A recent experiment suggests that physiological arousal, such as the excitement of playing a fast-paced video game, can make men more likely to find online dating profiles attractive. The research, posted as a preprint on SSRN and submitted to Computers in Human Behavior Reports, suggests that men may carry over excitement from an unrelated activity into their romantic judgments. Women, on the other hand, do not appear to show this same bias when evaluating potential partners.
The psychological concept at the center of this research is the arousal misattribution hypothesis. This idea proposes that people can experience physical signs of excitement, like a racing heart or sweaty palms, from a completely non-romantic source and mistakenly interpret those physical feelings as romantic or sexual attraction toward another person.
For example, in a classic 1974 experiment, men who crossed a scary, wobbly suspension bridge were more likely to later call a female researcher compared to men who crossed a safe, solid bridge. The bodily activation one feels during a scary movie or an intense ride might be incorrectly processed by the brain as a spark of chemistry with a date.
When scrolling through dating apps, users make very rapid judgments based on brief visual and textual information. In this environment, visual appeal is highly influential. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 indicated that physical attractiveness heavily dictates whether a dating profile is chosen, overshadowing other traits like occupation or intelligence. Relatedly, a 2008 study of online dating profiles found that physical appearance was one of the strongest predictors of how appealing people found a profile.
Most past research on misattributed arousal used traditional, face-to-face scenarios and older methods to trigger physical excitement. The authors of the new study wanted to see if this psychological quirk still happens in modern, digital environments where people select partners on screens. Led by Bahar Gürer and Yannik A. Escher at Leuphana University Lüneburg, the research team used virtual reality to safely and consistently create an arousing experience for participants before they evaluated simulated dating profiles.
The experiment included 130 participants recruited on a university campus (average age about 23). To begin, the researchers randomly assigned the participants to one of two virtual reality experiences. Half of the participants spent three minutes in a calm, low-arousal virtual environment, which involved looking at a peaceful forest scene. The other half spent three minutes playing a fast-paced, high-arousal virtual reality rhythm game called Beat Saber.
After the virtual reality session, participants viewed eight mock dating profiles designed to look like a dating app. These profiles were tailored to match each participant’s reported sexual orientation. For each profile, participants answered questions about the person’s attractiveness, perceived sexual warmth, and compatibility. They also rated how similar they felt the person was to them, whether they thought the person would return their romantic interest, and how likely they would be to go on a date with them. Finally, participants made a binary choice to either approve or reject the profile, mimicking the swiping mechanism of modern dating platforms.
The results showed a consistent pattern of elevated interest among participants in the high-arousal group. Those who played the intense virtual reality game rated the dating profiles higher in attractiveness and sexual warmth than those who viewed the calming forest scene. The high-arousal group also perceived the people in the profiles as more similar to themselves, felt higher levels of compatibility, and expected that the profile owners would like them in return. The only measure that was not statistically significant was the participants’ reported likelihood of actually going on a date, though the trend leaned in a positive direction.
Overall, the arousing experience boosted the probability of participants approving a profile from 17.4 percent to 24.9 percent. However, when the researchers conducted planned exploratory analyses to look at men and women separately, they noticed a stark gender divide. For men, the high-arousal condition drastically increased the likelihood of approving a profile. Men in the calm group approved only 11.3 percent of the profiles they saw, but men in the high-arousal group approved 31.4 percent of them. This means that men who played the arousing game were nearly three times as likely to swipe right on a potential partner.
In contrast, the virtual reality experience had virtually no effect on women’s dating choices. Women in the high-arousal group approved 20.5 percent of the profiles, which was slightly lower than the 23.3 percent approval rate seen in the low-arousal group. Women’s ratings of the profiles’ attractiveness and compatibility also did not shift based on their physical excitement levels. The researchers pointed to an existing theory proposing that men rely more heavily on bodily signals when judging their feelings, while women pay more attention to contextual clues.
“Thrilling experiences may enhance many people’s romantic lives,” Rui Miguel Costa, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences at Universidade Europeia in Lisbon, told PsyPost. Costa, who is also a member of the Research Center in Sports Sciences, Health Sciences, and Human Development (CIDESD) in Portugal and was not involved in the study, noted that the findings align with prior observations. “It is consistent with other studies finding that previous exposure to arousing situations increases subsequent sexual arousal and attractiveness for opposite-sex people,” he said.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. Notably, this paper is a preprint, meaning it has not yet been peer-reviewed. Peer review is a process where independent experts evaluate a study’s methods, results, and conclusions before it is officially published in an academic journal. Because this research has not gone through that formal vetting process, its findings should be treated as preliminary.
Another limitation is that the researchers relied on self-reported feelings of physical arousal rather than using objective medical devices like heart rate monitors or skin conductance sensors. Because people can sometimes misjudge or struggle to describe their own bodily states, future studies could benefit from tracking participants’ actual biological responses.
There are also a few details to consider regarding the dating profiles themselves. The researchers chose faces that varied in attractiveness, but none were rated as highly attractive, and participants’ ratings were fairly low overall. The effect might look different with very attractive profiles.
Finally, the laboratory setting meant that participants faced no real social consequences for approving or rejecting a profile. Real-world dating apps carry the potential for actual conversations, dates, and rejection. The lack of stakes in a mock environment might change how closely someone weighs their physical feelings against a potential partner’s traits.
The researchers noted that while their study partially replicates the classic 1974 bridge experiment, the effect size they observed was about half as large. The authors suggested several reasons, including the low stakes of swiping on a screen, the possibility that participants consciously discounted the arousal they knew came from the game, and the likelihood that the small 1974 study originally overestimated the true effect. Exploring these dynamics in a live dating app environment could help researchers understand how physical excitement sways romantic choices.
“I think there are problems with the interpretation in terms of arousal-misattribution hypothesis, which implies that high attraction results from misinterpretation of partner’s value,” Costa said. “In real life, outside of theoretical theorizing, people we look at and the contexts [they] are in are indissociable. In the real world, arousal elicited by other people is inextricably intertwined with the arousal elicited by contextual factors.”
According to Costa, evaluating a person’s appeal entirely separate from their environment is nearly impossible. “Absolute intrinsic attractiveness of a partner is something that only exists in abstractions and theoretical models, not in the real world, and ultimately, none of us can precisely identify all sources of arousal that affect us; the mystery of passion may lie somewhere here,” Costa added.
When it comes to future research, Costa suggested that researchers should directly ask participants about their awareness of these effects. “In next studies, it would be important to ask participants to what extent they think their attraction is being influenced by the previous arousing situation,” Costa said. “Probably, many people are actually aware of these enhancing influences. Remarkably, this type of question has not been done.”
The study, “High Arousal, High Attraction? A Virtual-Reality Experiment Testing the Arousal-Misattribution-Hypothesis in Online Dating,” was authored by Bahar Gürer, Yannik A. Escher, Hannes M. Petrowsky, and David D. Loschelder.