Five papers in one field-study corpus were retracted.
I spent about a year reading the primary literature behind mainstream dating advice, mostly because I’d repeated a lot of it confidently and wanted to check I hadn’t been wrong. I had been.
Some confident, citation-flavoured advice rests on studies that were later retracted, placed under formal expressions of concern, or contradicted by larger studies. Those updates rarely travel as far as the original headline.
Four examples and what the records support
Sources are named at the point of use.
1. The touch-and-compliance papers Retracted
Five papers in the field-experiment corpus of Nicolas Guéguen were retracted online on February 25, 2025. Two concerned touch and compliance; the others concerned bust size and hitchhiking, hair colour, and eye contact. The notice cited implausible methods, unresolved questions about ethics approval and informed consent, and data-fidelity or analysis problems.
That record does not justify treating the retracted papers as evidence for a courtship tactic. It also does not establish that every touch study or every broader claim about touch has been disproved.
2. Wear red Very small estimate
For women rating men, a 2018 meta-analysis estimated the red-attractiveness effect at d = 0.13, with evidence that the estimate may be biased upward. The preregistered studies in the same analysis averaged d = −0.10. (Lehmann, Elliot & Calin-Jageman, 2018)
That is too small and uncertain to support a confident dating strategy. Wear red because you like red.
3. Ovulation targeting Narrowed by larger studies
Two 2014 meta-analyses reached different conclusions about whether women’s mate preferences shift across the cycle. (Gildersleeve, Haselton & Fales, 2014; Wood et al., 2014)
Later large studies using hormone assays found no compelling cycle shift in preferences for facial or vocal masculinity. That is a narrower result than saying all attraction or desire is unchanged across the cycle. (Jones et al., 2018; Jünger et al., 2018)
4. “Deviance in the dark” A 1973 magazine report
The account cited for “deviance in the dark” was published in Psychology Today in 1973, not as a conventional peer-reviewed journal article with a full methods and results section. (Gergen, Gergen & Barton, 1973)
That makes it a weak foundation for broad recommendations about how dim lighting changes behaviour. It does not show that lighting never affects mood or social behaviour.
Why the old claims keep circulating
Retractions and corrections do not always reach the readers who saw the original claim. An old headline can keep circulating after the journal record changes.
Five questions to run on any “research says” claim
- Has it been retracted? Check the journal record and retraction databases before relying on the conclusion.
- Was it preregistered? Preregistration reduces analytic flexibility. A small unregistered study deserves more caution.
- Did an independent team find it? Look for direct or conceptual replication before changing your behaviour.
- What is the effect size? Ask what was reported, how uncertain it was, and whether publication bias could inflate it.
- Who were the participants, and what were the stakes? Undergraduates rating hypothetical strangers on a screen generalise poorly to a live Tuesday.
These questions do not turn a reader into a methodologist. They do make it harder for a confident headline to stand in for the underlying evidence.
What the evidence supports
The book’s method is modest. Ask a clearer question, make declining easy, remove pressure and say what you mean.
That work became the book. Each graded claim names its source. Tested findings stay separate from the author’s inferences. See the full research method, search the public Attraction Evidence Ledger, or read the first three chapters free below. The five questions above are printed in the sample so you can run them on the book itself.