I recently attended the Galton Institute's conference on mate choice, and was lucky to grab an interview with Prof. Melinda Mills, head of The University of Oxford's Department of Sociology. We spoke about Melinda's research on ethnicity and internet dating, why attitudes to migration shape who we are willing to date, and discussed some of the difficulties inherent in studying dating preferences on the web. I also talk about some new research on selfies and who takes them.

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Who Takes Selfies?

Men and women post a similar number of ‘relfies’ to social media. Roberto Trombetta/Flickr

The articles covered in the show:

Potârcă, G., & Mills, M. (2015). Racial preferences in online dating across European countries. European Sociological Review, 31(3), 326-341. Read summary

Sorakowska, A., Oleszkiewicz, A., Frackowiak, T., Pisanski, K., Chmiel, A., & Sorokowski, P. (2016). Selfies and personality: Who posts self-portrait photographs? Personality and Individual Differences, 90, 119-123. Read summary

Satoshi Kanazawa's recent blog post “Why black women are less physically attractive than other women” has ignited a firestorm of protest across the web. In this special episode, we find out if his controversial claim stands up to scrutiny.

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In this special episode I talk with biological anthropologist Mark Shriver, Nanjala Nyabola, an Oxford graduate student who wrote a comment piece for the Guardian about Kanazawa's article, and psychologists Scott Barry Kaufman and Jelte Wicherts, who blogged about the controversy here and here and also reanalysed the original data. You can read Kanazawa's blog post here.

A graph from the reanalysis of Kanazawa's data by Wicherts and Kaufman, illustrating the lack of a difference in perceived attractiveness amongst women of different ethnic backgrounds (click to enlarge).