As a psychologist, I have always found the concept of speed dating fascinating. In fact, some years ago, I decided to try it myself. At the time, I had just moved to Boston and didn’t know that many people yet, so I figured I would give the speed-dating scene a go. As it turns out, I like to talk – so much, in fact, that I have a tendency to talk people’s ears off. When the little buzzer went off after three minutes, I was (typically) still in the process of trying to explain to my bedazzled dating partner why my last name has three syllables (it’s Dutch). As you can imagine, I did not find the love of my life.

Fortunately, the majority of people do not seem to share my particular troubles with speed dating. Yet new research does point out a different dating problem: being confronted with a large number of choices can make it harder to make a good decision. In fact, it can even prevent you from a making a decision in the first place.  You might assume that when trying to find a good dating partner, having a large, varied pool of potential candidates available to you is a good thing, but new research indicates that it is not. Alison Lenton and Marco Francesconi recently published an article in the Royal Society of Biological Letters in which they analyzed over 3,700 human dating decisions across 84 speed-dating events. The authors found that when the available dates varied more in attributes such as age, height, occupation and educational background, people made fewer dating proposals. This effect was particularly strong when people were faced with a large number of potential partners. In fact, when both conditions were present, participants were more likely to make no decision at all.