No doubt about it, scientists do amazing things. But sometimes people in white coats emerge from the labs, proud and exhausted with conclusions that are so painfully obvious (Beautiful people have more romantic options! Confident people are more attractive!) that it makes us wonder why they even bothered. So why do they? “We can’t assume the obvious, because sometimes what we believe to be fact is colored by our social experience and expectation,” says Scott Haltzman, M.D., author of The Secrets of Happily Married Women. “A century ago, it was ‘fact’ that women couldn’t be expected to be intelligent enough to vote, and that women who were pregnant needed to avoid any heavy exercise. It is ‘obvious’ that chocolate is bad, or that wine is bad. Newer studies show there are health benefits. Until we test out what we ‘know’ is true, then we are just perpetuating stereotypes. Scientists need to re-do studies, because almost always, there are methodological problems in previous studies. One interesting study that showed women were more likely to describe themselves as ‘feelers’ rather than being mechanistically inclined showed [that] the difference disappeared if you didn’t ask the person to identify themselves by sex at the beginning of the study,” explains Haltzman.

The fact is, so-called “obvious research” offers insights about dating and relationships that we need in order to make informed decisions about our own love lives. And people are fascinated by the results even if they could have predicted them as common-sense outcomes, says Haltzman: “People are drawn to reading about and hearing about these studies because humans are social animals, and on an unconscious level, we are constantly trying to make sense of social cues to improve our own standing among our peers. A guy may guess that when a woman strokes a beer bottle and gazes downward she’s interested in him, but it helps to have the scientific proof to back it up!”