Mark your calendars for the Science Cafe', Border's Bookstore Cafe, 7-9 pm, Wed. Feb. 13, 2008.
The topic is: Searching for love: Adventures in speed-dating (and beyond) by Peter M. Todd, Professor, Cognitive Science, Informatics, and Psychological and Brain Sciences, IUB.
The choice of a partner for marriage or cohabitation is one of the key events in the course of our lives. But how do we make this choice—more specifically, how do we decide when our search is over? To find out, we could follow a set of individuals through multiple relationships, and try to determine what makes the lasting ones stick; but this would be a long and expensive process. Instead, we can speed things up: We can build simulated mate-seekers who embody plausible decision rules for searching for partners, and see how they fare in an artificial mating market, comparing their behavior to that of aggregated humans. We can also speed up human mate-seekers themselves, by inviting them to participate in speed-dating events, and observe their searches there as they meet and interact with a succession of potential partners. Both methods can help us assess whether people searching for love learn from their mistakes, adjusting their aspiration levels lower after failed relationships and higher after successful ones. We will discuss the development and implications of these ideas—and further opportunities for field-testing them on Valentine's Day—in this session.
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