This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Dating apps like Bumble and Tinder can help singles couple up.

But online dating, it's also great for scientists.

There's so much folk wisdom about dating and very little hard evidence.

Elizabeth Brooke is a computational social scientist at the University of Michigan.

She recently used online dating data to answer this question.

What does it mean for someone to be out of your league and is there a way that we can study

that using the techniques of network science.

Brooke and our colleague Mark Newman studied who swapped messages with whom on a popular online

dating platform in the month of January 2014.

They categorize users by desirability using page rank, one of the algorithms

behind search technology. Essentially, if you receive a dozen messages from desirable users, you

must be more desirable than someone who receives the same

number of messages from average users. And then they asked, how far out of their league do online

daters tend to go when pursuing a partner?

I think people are optimistic realists.

In other words, they found that both men and women

tended to pursue mates just 25% more desirable than themselves.

So they're being optimistic, but they're also taking into account

their own relative position within this overall desirability hierarchy.

All the graphs and charts are in the journal Science Advances.

And the study did have a few more lessons for people on the market.

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