It's a tale as old as time: Boy meets girl. Boy asks girl on a date. Girl says she just considers boy a friend and goes out with a bartender with gauge earrings and a Fu Manchu mustache instead. Boy goes on the internet to complain to other dudes why girls don't like "nice guys" anymore before saying it's OK 'cause he wasn't that into that fat slut anyway.

Well, men of the internet, you no longer can use that excuse. Science has confirmed what women have long known: Ladies do like nice guys, after all! They just don't like you, because you're an asshole.

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Published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology and led by the University of Worcester's Daniel Farrelly, the study asked more than 200 straight women to look at two sets of photographs. One of the photos depicted a conventionally handsome man, while the other showed a man who was... slightly less so.

The researchers then described two scenarios to the women, one of which involved one of the men (Person E) buying a sandwich and a cup of tea for a homeless person outside a cafe. The other scenario described the other man (Person F) seeing the same homeless man, then instead "pretends to use his mobile phone and walks straight past the homeless person." (Yeah, OK, we've all done it.) In some scenarios, Person E was the conventionally handsome dude; in others, he was the fuglier one.

The researchers then asked the women to rate how attractive they found the men, on a scale from one to five. Overwhelmingly, the women were more interested in Person E, regardless of what he actually looked like. "Individuals who displayed high levels of altruism were rated significantly more desirable overall," the researchers wrote.

And in an M. Night Shyamalan-level plot twist, while the women preferred to date someone who was both altruistic and handsome, the paper said, altruism was most important, "even when it is presented with other notable mate choice traits (such as physical attractiveness)."

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Needless to say, this is far from the first time researchers have discovered that the "nice guys finish last" trope is horseshit. A 2003 study asking women to compare the online dating profiles of "Nice Todd," "Neutral Todd" and "Jerky Todd" found that women were eight times more likely to say they'd rather date "Nice Todd" than "Jerky Todd," even though the three profiles used identical photos. (Though why a woman would want to date someone named Todd is beyond us.)

Other research has bolstered this idea, saying that while women care less about qualities like kindness and intelligence for short-term flings, women actively seek out nice guys for committed relationships.

There you have it, gentlemen: The reason why that girl on Tinder isn't responding to your messages isn't because she's hates what a great guy you are. She's turned off by the fact that you sent her 20 aggressively worded messages asking why she hasn't texted you back, because doesn't she want to date a nice guy like you? Ugh, whatever, she's a slut anyway.

h/t Pacific Standard