Hooking up: sometimes ya do, sometimes ya don’t. It all seems like a bit of a gamble sometimes, but how lucky – statistically speaking – to you have to be to get lucky?

Colin Hendrie, a psychologist at the University of Leeds, decided to conduct his research in places where humans do their sexual display-work. What a seed. He noted – I’m sure in an objective, non-pervy fashion – that “young, sexually mature individuals of both sexes to congregate into particular but arbitrary physical locations and dance. These may be areas of traditional use (e.g., nightclubs, discotheques or dance-halls) or areas that are temporarily commissioned for the same purpose such as at house parties, rock festivals etc.” Hendrie chose to set up his study in ‘Majestyk’s’ nightclub in Leeds, which looked like this circa New Years Eve 1996:

Hendrie investigated human hook-up patterns in this commercial club environment, wanting to know who likes who, which clothes guys like the most, which dance moves make you sexy, and a host of other things 14-year old girls discuss on the bus to school. He made his observations from a balcony above the dance floor – echoes of Mooseheads, Canberrans? – and gathered over 70 hours of data. That’s a lot of one more times to hear the DJ drop Daft Punk’s ‘One More Time’.

First, Hendrie wanted to see if it was the girls or the guys doing the initial approaching. He analysed 126 bouts of initiated dancing and found a massive sex difference in who was approaching who. And the winner was, surprise surprise, the guys. With a whopping 105 initiations to the girls’ paltry 21, the men are “far more stimulated to approach females then females are to approach males”.

Once Hendrie had this figured out, he wanted to know what made men approach particular women. While it was probably their big brains, lovely smiles and personalities, Hendrie chose instead to concentrate on how much boob they had on display. He used this grid to determine how much skin was showing in the breast arena:

And by determining each woman’s ‘breast exposure percentage’, Hendrie could determine how much of an effect this had on male approaches. Again, no prizes for guessing how this turned out:

Here, we see, that boobs get the dudes. Clothing tightness was another factor taken into account, and when high breast exposure and tight clothing were coupled … KABLAMO! Lots of attention. While only 20% of the women in da club coupled “tight fitting clothing that revealed more than 40% of their flesh and 50% of their breast area”, this small group attracted nearly half (49%) of all the hit-ons by the guys. Again, it’s not rocket science: Supre has been successfully sewing to this formula since forever.

Overall, it turned out nightclubs were a fairly good place to pick up. While 80% of people entered the nightclub without a partner, “there was a net gain of around 50% of mixed-sex couples leaving the nightclub”. This means that the percentage of partnered peeps jumped from 20 to 30%. And while Hendrie clearly couldn’t be sure that these new couples were heading home to do the deed, you can assume that they weren’t off to go play a game of Scrabble.

So there they are: the stats of picking up. If you’re feeling like a bit of a statistical anomaly in this department – i.e. you haven’t seen any in a while – here’s some smooth science lines to get you started:

* Do you have 11 protons? Cause you’re sodium fine.

* If I was an enzyme, I’d be helicase so I could unzip your genes.

* Are you a carbon sample? Because I want to date you.

* You must be auxin, because you’re causing me to have rapid stem elongation.

* You must be calcium bicarbonate, because if you let me get you wet, then the reaction will be explosive.

* You know.. it’s not the length of the vector that counts… it’s how you apply the force.

Happy mating!