Most cities that host speed dating events can point to the format's general popularity. New York can point to something more specific: this is the city where one of the most cited academic studies on speed dating was actually conducted, on a campus a few subway stops from where we've hosted hundreds of our own events. Nineteen years and 2,100-plus events later, we still find ourselves coming back to what that research actually found, because it explains a lot about what we watch happen in the room, night after night.
The study, in detail
In 2006, Columbia Business School economists Raymond Fisman, Sheena Iyengar, Emir Kamenica, and Itamar Simonson published "Gender Differences in Mate Selection: Evidence from a Speed Dating Experiment" in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, one of the oldest professional economics journals in the English language. Their method was unusually direct for economics research: run real speed dating events with roughly 400 Columbia graduate students, randomly vary how many potential partners each person saw in a given session, and record actual, real-time decisions rather than asking people to describe what they think they want in a partner.
That distinction matters more than it might sound. Most research on attraction and mate preference relies on surveys, asking people to rank what matters to them. This study instead had participants sit across from real people for four-minute conversations, then privately mark yes or no on whether they'd want to see that person again. The gap between what people say and what they actually do turned out to be enormous.
What the study found
The headline results still hold up nearly two decades later. Men responded more strongly to physical attractiveness in the moment than women did. Women weighted intelligence and ambition more heavily, but with a real ceiling: men in the study did not value a woman's intelligence or ambition once it exceeded their own, a finding that's been cited in dozens of follow-up papers since. Women also showed a measurable preference for men who'd grown up in more affluent neighborhoods, an economic signal that had nothing to do with the conversation itself.
Group size produced one of the study's more counterintuitive findings. Male selectivity stayed essentially flat no matter how many potential partners were in the room that night. Female selectivity, by contrast, increased sharply as the group got larger, more options made women choosier, not less picky, a pattern that runs opposite to the "more choice equals less discernment" assumption a lot of dating app design seems to be built around.
The gap between what people say and what they do
Perhaps the most striking finding, from a companion analysis by some of the same researchers, is this: participants' stated preferences before the event correlated only weakly with their actual decisions at the table, in the range of essentially no relationship to only mild correlation. In plain terms, people were consistently bad predictors of their own taste when asked in the abstract, and consistently better at recognizing what they wanted the moment it was actually sitting across from them.
That's not a minor footnote. It's arguably the single strongest argument against any dating format built entirely around stated preferences, filling out a profile, listing your "must-haves," swiping based on a bio. If the people in this study couldn't reliably predict their own choices on paper, a system asking strangers to do the same thing at scale has the same blind spot built in from the start.
The same research team later ran a related study, "Racial Preferences in Dating: Evidence from a Speed Dating Experiment," published in 2008 in the Review of Economic Studies, using the same New York speed dating sessions to examine how racial preferences played out in real decisions versus stated ones. Same city, same format, another layer of evidence that what people do in the room and what they'd tell a survey are often two different things.
What eye contact reveals that a bio can't
A more recent study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, tracked eye contact during five-minute speed dating conversations and found that shared and received eye contact predicted who people actually chose afterward. Not stated interests. Not conversation topic. Eye contact, a purely nonverbal signal that a dating profile has no mechanism to convey at all, no matter how well written the bio is.
This tracks with something our hosts have said for years, watching thousands of six and seven minute conversations unfold: the real chemistry lives in things a screen simply cannot transmit, and it shows up fast, often before either person has said anything particularly memorable.
Our own data, from the same city
We've hosted more than 2,100 speed dating events across New York since 2007, at venues including Flûte Champagne Bar in Midtown and Jones Wood Foundry on the Upper East Side. With events typically bringing together 16 to 40 daters a night, that's somewhere north of 40,000 real, face-to-face conversations over nineteen years, a dataset run in the same city as the Columbia research, just considerably longer in duration and larger in total scale.
What we've observed at that size lines up closely with everything above. The conversations that turn into real matches are rarely the ones with the most polished opening line or the most carefully curated self-description beforehand. They're the ones where two people are actually looking at each other and actually responding to what the other just said, exactly the pattern the eye-contact research measured directly, and exactly the kind of in-the-moment decision-making the Columbia study found people were far better at than predicting their own preferences on paper.
What this means if you're actually at one of our events
Skip the rehearsed opener, and don't spend too much energy trying to predict in advance exactly who you're hoping to meet. The research, some of it born right here in New York, suggests that effort is largely wasted. What actually predicts a connection is presence: looking at the person in front of you, responding to them, in real time, in the room. That's not advice we're inventing to sound wise. It's what nearly two decades of watching it happen, and a body of research collected a few miles from where you're reading this, both point to.
SpeedNY Dating has hosted in-person speed dating events across New York since 2007. See our upcoming events or explore curated introductions for a more one on one approach.
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