a much-coveted 2022 Ig Nobel award in September this year. The satirical awards seek to acknowledge and praise quirky research that makes people laugh — and then learn something new.
“We choose to award stuff that will grab people’s interest,” explains Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable research, who established the Ig Nobel awards in 1991. “It’s all about stuff that gets people excited.”Although the word "ignoble" technically refers to something that isn’t honorable in character, the Ig Nobel awards aren’t meant to make fun of or ridicule scientists, says Abrahams, instead they’re a celebration of strangely amusing research projects.
The latest recipients of the award paired 142 heterosexual participants — half male and half female — for a meeting inside a specially constructed “dating laboratory.” The scientists, based in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, measured several physiological phenomena during these first dates. The participants wore special glasses embedded with cameras to track their eye movements.
In the end, it’s the covert biological signals that give away a person’s attraction to another — and that’s simply not something that can be deduced from an online profile. In other words, it’s impossible to say for sure how you’ll feel about someone until you meet them. With that in mind, perhaps the most important part of online dating isn't actually about the "online" part at all.