Three days into Fall and the campaigning for next
election for the US President is now well under way. Many of us will be hunkering
down for a long winter. The Web will keep us well informed, presumably, with a
cacophony of Tweets. The parties, candidates and a plethora of ragtag
organizations will be wooing us for votes and cash – the political dating
web-sites will be open for business.
Many relationships start from Internet dating sites
these days. With almost $1bn in revenue, it is a lucrative business sector. It
is also a useful sector for social science geeks who are interested in data
mining. Why? Because the profiles that daters have submitted are useful fodder
for the number crunchers with the statistics programs.
Klofstad et al have started to wonder if daters
have politics in mind in the mate–attraction process (1). They start by noting
that the idea that our behavior and attitude is no longer considered to be just due
to our environment and how we were brought up, but that genetic profile has a
part to play in terms of predisposition. (Of course, a DNA profile won’t tell
us who will vote Republican or Democrat, or at least I haven’t heard that to be
the case.) Hence their question ‘Do we see our prospective mates through political
eyes?’
They did their data
mining and number crunching as best they could. Their major problem was that
daters weren’t eager to flaunt the color of their political underwear. They
were then forced to go the well-trodden route of assuming that the correlation
between education and civic engagement reflect political views, and this showed
that their initial assumption, that mate selection was actually along political lines was correct, even though it did not
initially appear that way.
Mmmm… I’m sure the
computers were churning hard and the statistical parameters looked good, but
perhaps the dater’s political views are the result of all of their other characteristics
and it is these that are matching. The vision their suggestion conjures up for
me is one of heated political debates going on in the subdued lights of the
boudoir as the culmination of a hot date.
- C.A.Klofstad, R.McDermot and P.K.Hatemi, J. Evolution Anim. Behav., (2011), doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.06.002
