Dr. Paul Eastwick, University of California at Irvine, is the Principal Investigator for the project. He explained three primary findings from the study (also see https://www.psypost.org/the-reality-of-romantic-preferences-large-scale-study-reveals-surprising-truths/)
“1. If you care about normative matching – do people like partners when they perceive those partners to have consensually desirable (e.g., ‘attractive’) rather than consensually undesirable (e.g., ‘easily upset’) traits – the effects are fairly large. I interpret these effects to mean ‘People have a shared understanding that some attributes are more evaluatively positive than others.’ Important, but somewhat obvious.”
“2. If you care about individual differences in desire – sometimes called distinctive-matching – you need to make certain statistical corrections that separate out the normative component. When you do this, across all 35 traits, you get significant – but pretty modest – effects, in the .10-.20 range. I interpret these effects to mean ‘If I think you match my particular unique preferences across 35 traits, I feel a little more positively about you.'”
“3. If you care about single attributes in isolation (i.e., do people who have a higher ideal for ‘attractiveness’ actually desire ‘attractive’ partners more?), these effects are tiny on average, and they’d be very hard to detect in a typical study. Some are larger (religious is notable in this respect), and some are no different from zero (i.e., warmth/trustworthiness). I interpret these effects to me: ‘If I say I desire a particular trait like attractiveness more than you do, that doesn’t mean very much.'”
The paper in preprint form, materials, and data are publicly available: https://osf.io/b29vu/?view_only=35a15592f8b04cdfb9ab32f45c73f3c6
Professor Vaughn and her undergraduate research team contributed to this project. She developed the IRB proposals for Ithaca College, managed data collection here, and helped write the paper. Her research team students recruited participants, helped trouble-shoot the Ithaca College data collection procedures, and collected data for the projects. They also are presenting two posters about the Ithaca College data at the 2024 New England Psychological Association in October.