Study: Women Like Men Who Dance Like This

In what is certain to be the year's most important study, researchers in Europe are instructing men on the best dance moves to win over women. The key seems to be moving one's head, neck, and torso a lot. In order to figure this out, researchers had to find a way to assess women's reactions to the moves alone, not the men doing them—so they opted to have avatars perform, the Washington Post reports. The dances of 30 real men were transferred to "featureless, gender-neutral" human forms onscreen. Thirty-seven women rated moves on a scale from one to seven.

The researchers identified various swings and gyrations by dividing the body into three parts: the legs, the arms, and the central body. Men who moved their heads, necks, and torsos a great deal, while varying those movements, scored highly—as did the guys who moved their right knees quickly. Arms didn't seem to matter. "Our results clearly show that there seems to be a strong general consensus as to what is seen as a good and bad dance, and that women appear to like and look for the same sort of moves," one researcher tells Science 2.0. Another offers some advice: "If a man knows what the key moves are, he can get some training and improve his chances of attracting a female." (Another cool dancing study: Click to read about how ballet alters dancers' brains.)