Chapter 42 Exercises: Open Questions and Future Directions

Chapter 42 Exercises: Open Questions and Future Directions

Exercise 1: Your Research Agenda — Design One Study

If you could design one study to address one of the open questions in this chapter, what would it be?

Choose a single open question from the chapter — the nature of interpersonal chemistry, the origins of sexual orientation, long-term desire, algorithmic compatibility prediction, AI companionship effects, or any other question that genuinely interests you — and write a 500–700 word research proposal addressing:

a) The question: State it as precisely as you can. What, specifically, would this study seek to answer?

b) The design: What methods would you use? Who would be in your sample and how would you recruit them? What would you measure, and how?

c) The rationale: Why is this question important? What would be gained — scientifically, and for human flourishing — if you could answer it?

d) The hard parts: What are the main methodological challenges? What ethical considerations would shape the design?

You do not need to produce a publishable proposal. You need to show that you understand why the question is hard and have thought seriously about what good evidence would look like.

Exercise 2: The Research Agenda

Imagine you have been appointed to a five-person advisory committee tasked with setting the priorities for a new $50 million research initiative called "The Next Decade in Attraction Science." The committee must recommend three major research programs — each representing an investment of approximately $15 million over ten years.

Working individually or in small groups:

a) Draft your three recommended research programs. Each program should have: a clear research question, a proposed approach (methods, sample strategy, collaborating disciplines), and a rationale for why this is a priority given current knowledge gaps.

b) Write a brief (300–400 word) statement explaining how your three programs relate to each other. Do they address different levels of the BPSC model? Different kinds of questions (tractable unknowns vs. hard philosophical problems)? Different populations?

c) What research questions did you not prioritize, and why?

Exercise 3: The Ethics Committee

Section 42.9 raises the question of whether some research should not be conducted, or should be conducted only with specific precautions. Choose one of the following scenarios and write a 500–700 word ethics committee memo addressing whether the proposed research should be approved, modified, or declined:

Scenario A: A team of neuroscientists proposes to use fMRI to identify the neural signatures of attraction in participants who are shown photographs of real people from their social networks (with the photographed individuals' consent). The team then proposes to use machine learning to build a "neural attraction signature" that could, in principle, identify who any individual is attracted to based on their neural response patterns.

Scenario B: A social psychologist proposes to study racial preferences in online dating by creating fake profiles and systematically varying race, controlling for all other characteristics. Participants would not be told they are in a study until after data collection; debriefing would follow. The goal is to produce the cleanest possible causal evidence about racial discrimination in the dating market.

Scenario C: A startup has proposed to partner with a university to use the university's attraction research data — including attachment style measures, physiological data, and relationship history — to train a compatibility matching algorithm for commercial use. The original research participants consented to their data being used for research purposes but not explicitly for commercial applications.

Your memo should address: (a) what is scientifically at stake, (b) what potential harms exist and to whom, (c) what safeguards would mitigate the harms, and (d) your recommendation.

Exercise 4: Letter to a Future Researcher

Write a 400–500 word letter to an attraction researcher who will be doing their work in 2050, roughly twenty-five years from now. Assume they are reviewing the scientific literature as it stood in the mid-2020s as historical background to their current research.

What do you hope they will have discovered by then? Which of the open questions in this chapter do you most hope will be answered — and what would it mean for our understanding of human relationships if it were? What question do you think will still be open in 2050, and why? What would you want this future researcher to know about what it felt like to work at this frontier — with all the uncertainty, excitement, and methodological humility that entailed?

Exercise 5: Reflection — The Question You'll Keep Thinking About

This is the last exercise in the course. It does not require research or citation. It requires honesty.

Write 300–400 words in response to this question: What question from this course will you keep thinking about after the semester ends?

It does not have to be one of the formally open questions surveyed in this chapter — though it might be. It might be a question about your own relational history, a question about a social pattern you've observed, a question the research raised and didn't answer satisfactorily, or a question you came into the course carrying and now see differently.

Whatever it is: write about why it matters to you personally, what the course has given you for thinking about it, and what you still don't know.

There is no right answer. There is only the quality of the reflection.

Discussion Questions for Seminar

The chapter argues that the failure of compatibility prediction algorithms reveals something fundamental about the nature of attraction — that compatibility is irreducibly relational and not decomposable into individual characteristics. Do you find this argument convincing? What would it mean for the dating app industry if it is correct?
The chapter treats the hard problem of consciousness as genuinely difficult rather than a soon-to-be-solved puzzle. How does this affect the status of neuroscientific claims about attraction — are they describing something fundamental, or only correlates of something we don't fully understand?
Section 42.11 argues that the research agenda implied by this course's frameworks requires changes in academic incentive structures — hiring, promotion, granting priorities. What specific changes would you advocate for? Who would resist them, and why?