Available Guys Better Step Lively
Guys, are you being lapped by rivals in love and romance? Well, pick up the pace. Literally.
Two Austrian researchers suggest that men who walk faster are more attractive to women. In much the same fashion that a peacock displays his fan, more desirable men signal their superiority by walking at a brisk pace, thus gaining some minute advantage over slower-footed fellows in the eternal race to reproduce.
At least, that’s the theory of psychologists Alain Schmitt and Klaus Atzwanger of the University of Vienna. To test their educated guess, they clocked the pace of 200 randomly selected pedestrians on city streets in Vienna. After measuring their walking speed (about four feet a second, on average), they interviewed these walkers and collected information about their jobs, education and income. They also asked them where they were going and how many appointments they had.
Just as they suspected, better-educated and more-affluent men with more-prestigious jobs walked faster than less-advantaged guys - even when they were going no place in particular or had light schedules. High-status women, on the other hand, were no more speedier than other females.
“Habitual fast walking might be a means to show high resource-holding potential (ambition), to signal actual status and, last but not least, to acquire resources (hunting, rushing in business life),” wrote Schmitt and Atzwanger in the latest issue of the journal Ethology and Sociobiology.
It all harkens back, they argue, to the days when guys hunted things and foot speed translated into full tummies for their families, thus making fast men more desirable mates. Today, a brisk walking pace is just the ‘90s way of informing the opposite sex that you’re a primo hunter and gatherer, they wrote.
Well, maybe. But even if their work proves to be more glib than true, how fast we walk appears to say important things about who we are, particularly for men.
For example, researchers in the 1930s first discovered that the walking pace of men but not women fell precipitously after they lost a job - so much so that the actual walking speed of unemployed men dropped to about 20 percent below that of women.
And psychologists in the United States and abroad have discovered that people in cities walk faster than those who live in small towns, perhaps as an escape from cognitive overload (crowding, traffic noise) or because the higher costs of city living increase the value of time, thus prodding city residents to pick up their pace.
Nation of stooges
More than half of all Americans can’t name a single justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, according to a recent survey by the Luntz Research Cos., Arlington, Va.
But who cares? When it comes to something really important - say, naming the Three Stooges - most Americans are summa cum laude graduates of the Kollege of Knowledge: 59 percent could name three of the stooges, 6 percent could name four and 2 percent correctly named five stooges.
Five stooges? That’s right: Over the course of their movie lives, there were five Stooges: Moe, Larry and Curly - the core Stooges - and also Shemp and Curly Joe. In addition, an almost-Stooge, Joe Besser, appeared briefly in the 1950s.