Deception by Keith Barry

[zekko]

I watched this show on TV the other night. Keith Barry is a mentalist and he did a whole episode on dating. Mentalists are a type of magician, so some of what they do is just a trick, but they might also employ forms of hypnotism, suggestion, reading body language, and the like. I don't know if this particlar segment was legit or not, but it caught my interest:

There were five women seated at tables, and 10 men cycled through and had speed dates with them. Each guy had a number on him, 1 through 10. Barry observed from a distance and watched their body language.

Then he lined the girls up and selected one man to stand behind each girl with his hand on her shoulder. Barry then asked each girl which guy they liked and would be interested in dating further. He had correctly matched up each girl with the guy she had chosen. Supposedly he did this by reading their body language.

Now here's what I think is unusual about this: They tell you here that women will all tend to want the same top 10-20% of males, the alpha males. That certain men are more desireable than other men. So I thought it was strange that each woman picked a different man. You would have thought that at least a couple of them would have picked the same man. That one guy would have been more desireable than the others (have better game or whatever) and charmed several of the girls. Yet that did not happen.

Of course maybe the whole trick was complete BS, in which case the results are meaningless.

 

[Atom Smasher]

It could be that the participants were carefull pre-screened out of hundreds in order to skew the results based on a phsycological template. In other words, perhaps they preselected for character traits, body language, etc. that lines up with what they know to combine well.

It does seem that correctly guessing all 5 would require some manipulation or skewing of odds, but then again it is easy for any of us to watch a couple interact and get a good idea of how one feels about the other. Presumably he is an expert on body language so his results would likely be very high.

Interesting post, Zekko. I'd like to see others' takes on it.

 

[st_99]

Of course maybe the whole trick was complete BS, in which case the results are meaningless.

The problem is you can never trust anything you see on tv.