Justin Garcia

Research has shown that someone's voice is involved in attraction, their body language, their facial symmetry, their social network, who they're friends with.

We do know that smell is important and all sorts of other things.

We know that dance is involved.

This is such a great question, and it's a pretty complicated one.

And I say that because there's a bunch of different things going on.

So when we think about the evolution of human courtship or attraction, it wasn't just one thing.

So sometimes I want to take us a step back and think about what we see in the animal world.

And when we look at courtship, sometimes we know there's a particular trait, how bright your tail feathers are, how big your plumage is, how strong you are.

And there are things like that involved in human attraction, but we know that there's an awful lot.

What happens is the brain then tries to pull and I'll go through some of them and the brain tries to pull that all together and then Kind of does its own algorithm of trying to figure out how you weigh all of those different things So research has shown for instance that someone's voice is involved in attraction their body language their facial symmetry their social network who they're friends with who they socialize with and

We do know that smell is important.

It's not entirely clear if it's picking up pheromones, which are a particular kind of hormone, or if it's other indicators of health and hygiene and all sorts of other things.

We know that dance is involved and behavioral synchrony.

OK, so the list can go on and on.

That is really telling because it tells us that in the human animal, there's a lot of different points of data input.

And sometimes one of those can make things go sideways.

Sometimes you say, well, this person looks attractive to me, they smell attractive to me, but oh my gosh, on the dance floor, I lost the chemistry.

The number one thing we found in our studies that singles look for in a potential romantic partner that they're most attracted to is someone they can trust and confide in.

So there's personality, there's psychology, there's also all these physical traits.

So there's a lot happening.