UvA graduate wins Ig Nobel Prize for research on attraction in dating
The attraction between people can be read from how synchronous their heartbeat is. This is evident from research Daniel Lindh worked on during his UvA PhD for which he has now received the Ig Nobel Prize. “How it works, we don't actually know.”
The Ig Nobel prizes are awarded annually to research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. It is good research, but often with unexpected or absurd topics.
One of the winners is cognitive neuroscience researcher Daniel Lindh. He worked with a research group in Leiden during his PhD program at the UvA. They investigated during blind dates how various bodily indicators change and whether it has anything to do with attraction between two people.
“I have actually been following the Ig Nobel awards since childhood," Lindh says, "You read about them every year and you never expect to receive it yourself. It's nice when your work gets positive attention in the media. What I found funny is that we were classified as applied cardiology, when it's actually a psychological study.”
Not everyone on the team was able go to the reception ceremony, but first author and researcher Eliska Prochazkova, who led the study, did. Lindh and Prochazkova know each other from their masters in Brain and Cognition at the UvA.
Trust
“The research group in Leiden that I worked with does a lot of research on social decision-making, for example, on trust between people in different situations,” Lindh explains. “In people who trust each other, gestures, smiles and expressions are more often synchronized than in people who don't. We then thought: maybe that also applies to attraction.”
The research for which Lindh eventually received the Ig Nobel Prize showed that when people's heartbeat and skin conductivity are synchronous, it best predicts attraction between the two. This mostly happens unconsciously. Lindh: “People were unexpectedly bad at predicting whether the other person found them attractive. Students who were shown videos of the date and had to rate them also scored poorly. Everyone scored at chance level; a guess would have been equally correct.”
Recognizing heartbeat
“How it works, we actually don't know. This was really the first study in this area. We do know that people are good at recognizing someone's heartbeat from their face. In any case, it's something unconscious. People can't explain exactly how they recognize the heartbeat.”
It was also unexpected that, unlike heartbeat, synchronizing gestures or laughter did not correlate with attraction, Lindh says. “Of course, it could be that people hold back because they are being watched. We had thought that such expressions of attraction would come naturally, but people are pretty good at hiding it.”
The exact mechanism behind these findings is not yet known. More research is also needed to determine whether the synchronous heartbeat is cause or effect.
Lindh's research group is not the only Dutch research that received the Ig Nobel Prize. A Nijmegen professor who researched about Maya people getting drunk from enemas and conducted experimental research on this was also awarded the prize.
