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Being highly intelligent may actually make you less attractive
Being too intelligence may actually reduce your chance to find the "one".
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Female participants show an interesting result when it comes to intelligence and easygoingness. (Shutterstock/File)
B
eing smart can definitely be an advantage in drawing a potential partner, but being overly smart may actually backfire, according to a recent research.
Conducted by Gilles Gignac and Clare Starbuck from the University of Western Australia, the research involved 214 young adults where 70 percent of them were female with an average age of 19.
The participants were required to rate how attracted they would be if their potential partner’s characteristic level was more than a certain percentage of the population. A six-point scale was provided from “extremely unattracted” to “extremely attracted”. Among the characteristics were intelligence, kindness, physical attractiveness and easygoingness.
Published in the British Journal of Psychology, the research indicated that both male and female respondents viewed four characteristics as desirable in their possible partner. However, female participants showed an interesting result when it came to intelligence and easygoingness. They believed both qualities were attractive as long as they are more than 90 percent of the population compared to more than 99 percent of the population.
Read also: Intelligent dating app pairs singles based on smarts
The study also suggests that high level of intelligence is related to disorders and negative traits, meanwhile extreme easygoingness is perceived to lead to less confidence and ambition.
“It’s well established that several characteristics are valued highly in a prospective partner,” Gignac told The British Psychological Society. “But the sort of continuous measurement used in our research is making it clear that several of these characteristics are associated with a threshold effect -- in other words, you can have too much of a good thing." (wir/kes)
