Law of the Dance?

I wrote the following whilst on the Media Fellowship at the Guardian but it never got published so, to put it to some use, here it is.

Women’s perception of men’s sensation seeking propensity from their dance movements

“Sing like no-one's listening,
love like you've never been hurt,
dance like nobody's watching,
and live like its heaven on earth.”
(A quote from Mark Twain)


But this time scientists are watching and have discovered that the dances of certain men are more attractive to women.

Scientists at the Institute of Zoology and Anthropology, University of Gottingen, Germany have found a connection between risk-taking, sensation-seeking men and how attractive women found their dancing.

According to the research, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, “dances of men with a high sensation seeking propensity are more attractive to women.”

“Certain features of personality, like risk-taking behaviours have an influence on men’s variations in movement styles and women make attractiveness judgements based on them.”

Previous work has suggested that men compete for the attention of women by demonstrating their athletic ability and strength. Researchers believe that dancing is a way in which men compete in this way.

This new study aimed to extend these findings to look at men´s risk-taking propensity as well as strength.

Mrs Hugill says: “Sensation seeking and in particular risk-taking behaviour is a costly behavioural trait (when you think on sky diving etc.), there is, for example, the risk of injuries, therefore not all men can show this trait.” Scientists conjectured that women find this “costly behavioural trait” attractive.

Are men´s risk-taking propensities also perceived by women solely by looking on their dance movements?

The researchers recruited 50 men and recorded them dancing to the same piece of pop music. 60 women scored each dancer’s perceived risk taking characteristics or attractiveness. The researchers chose a basic drum rhythm so that an individual’s own music preference wouldn’t influence the results. So whether you like West Life or Mega Death, this shouldn’t have made any difference to the conclusions.

Before setting foot on the dance floor, the men scored themselves on a Sensation-Seeking Scale (SSS) which asks question about a participants ‘thrill and adventure seeking’, ‘experience seeking’, ‘disinhibition’ and ‘boredom susceptibility’. The answers tell us about peoples core traits that determine types of personality. So a high sensation seeker would be more inclined to want to jump out of plane or behave conspicuously and a low sensation seeker may just want to stay in and watch TV.

Once all the moves had been thrown and the shapes made, it was the turn of the women to judge the videos. The researchers tried to remove all of the extra aspects that may influence whether a woman would find a man attractive. The videos were shown in black and white and without any sound. The quality of the videos was also deliberately reduced so that the women could make out the dance movement but not clearly judge any of the other physical characteristics, like strength, weight and height.

The women scored each dancer on attractiveness or perceived risk-taking using a 7 point scale. For example, for a particular dancer, a score of 1 would be associated with Mr Bean or a score of 7 would be associated with John Travolta.

Using all of the women’s risk-taking and attractiveness scores, strength, weight and height adjusted correlations were calculated. These showed that attraction correlated positively with sensation seeking.

The scientists have contributed something new and interesting to this area of research. However, like most experiments, there are several assumptions and limitations, that can be questioned or at least highlighted.

Is dancing actually an important behaviour in courtship? The researchers make references to some animals and tribes but do men and women in modern society really use dancing as a determinant of attractiveness?

What’s more, what does attractive mean in this context? When asked to score a dancer for attractiveness, does this equate to whether or not the woman would want to sleep with the man? Or perhaps just partner him on the dance floor?

Is risk taking in a man actually a good thing? And if so, is dancing really a case of risk-taking? It seems like a stretch to classify sky diving and disco dancing as comparable. Although perhaps this would include some cases of extreme break dancing.

Finally, don’t fall victim of the correlation-implies-causation fallacy. Just because someone is a risk taker does not mean they can seduce women on the dance floor.
So, to the question you’ve probably been asking yourself from the start. If you’re going to make use of the results of this research, what are the most attractive dance moves? Salsa? The Boogie Woogie? The Robot? Researchers don´t know completely what an attractive dance actually looks like but you can see what you think in the following videos taken from the study.

Seeing Patterns

I was struck by a comparison between Journalists and Statisticians.

Journalism is often about spotting and elaborating on (perceived) patterns.
Whereas statistics is about actual patterns.

When journalist see 2 or 3 things that appear to have some connection they think "pattern"! If this turns out to be a load of rubbish and plainly wrong it is quickly forgotten. A good example of this is with football commentary. Go back over what supposed football experts have said even just a week back and you're sure to see this.

This seems like a form of data mining and hypothesis generation so naturally you will always find something that looks like a pattern if you look hard enough.

Statistics on the otherhand- proper statistics- is the art of looking at something that looks like a pattern and thinking "random noise!". The journalist is too optimistic of his discovery and the statistician is conversely pessimistic.

In fact, this article is a case of me thinking that I've spotted something between 2 things. This could similarly just be nonsense.