The answers might surprise you. BBC Future rounds up some of our favourite – and most counterintuitive – insights from research around the world.

You don’t really have a ‘type’ – and neither does anyone else

Online dating is one of the most popular ways to meet a mate – but feeling like one profile out of a million can be intimidating. It might be heartening to know amidst the stream of faces, the face we saw before influences how attractive we perceive the next one to be.

This finding suggests that our perception of beauty, far from being deeply ingrained, is in fact very much fleeting. So, if someone is swiping along to your dating app profile, it may not be a bad thing to be among a sea of other people’s well-chosen, flattering pictures.