Friday, May 29, 2009

Picking Up Girls -- a Controlled Experiment

Two British guys recently realized that their success (and the success of men like them) in attracting women was directly related to whether they had a puppy with them at the time. So, clearly, women respond to men with puppies, but they wanted more data -- they wanted to find out which breeds women responded best to.

So, with the aid of a phone that automatically takes a picture when it detects a smile, they devised an experiment to test the "puppy pulling power" of ten different popular breeds in the UK.

I'm sure there's something deeply dubious, sexist, and otherwise horrible about this, and the various Humorless Forces of the Internet will soon put their boot in -- but it's also a wonderful example of using geeky advantages to counterweight geeky disadvantages, and I have to salute that.

(I also note that there's a distinctive posture of the young women as they lean over to pet the dog -- I'm uncertain if capturing that was part of the point, or a serendipitous bonus. One excellent example is below.)

[via Geekologie]

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