Corrections
Anyone publishing for long enough will get something wrong. This page is where we record what we got wrong and how we fixed it.
How corrections work here
When a reader, editor, or researcher points out a factual error in one of our articles, we verify the claim, fix the article, and add an entry to this page describing what changed and why. Minor tweaks (typos, broken links, clearer phrasing without a change in meaning) are made silently. Anything that changes what a reader would take away from the piece is logged here.
If you've found something we got wrong, please email [email protected] with the article URL and a description of the issue. We respond to every well-evidenced correction.
Log
- 2026-09-29About page, article bylines and reading times
Three claims the site made about itself, corrected. First, the about page said Attraction Laboratory had been built by a small team of people who met on the other side of difficult relationships, and that we wrote from having been in those situations rather than at a clinical remove. There is no team and those experiences were a writing device; the page now says who runs the site, that the prose is drafted by AI against an assembled bibliography, and how identification of the person responsible can be obtained. The editorial policy had already been corrected on the same point in September, and the AI disclosure has stated the drafting arrangement all along, which made the about page the last page carrying the older story. Second, the byline on every article described the writing as coming “from people who’ve been there”; it now describes how the writing is actually made. Third, the reading time shown on each article and card was a number entered by hand for each piece, and two different methods had been used, so on several pages it was close to half the real figure — one article stating 16 minutes for 5,600 words, another 14 minutes for 5,300. It is now calculated from the text of the page (introduction, body and FAQ answers, at 225 words a minute), which moved most articles up by several minutes. No article text changed, apart from one link description in “Signs Someone Is Quietly Into You” that still referred to the piece it links to by its old, male-specific title.
- 2026-09-28
Full rewrite, and four problems fixed. First, the article was written as first-person experience and addressed to women only, under a title that assumed a man hiding his feelings; the research it now cites points the other way, since in the studies that asked (Ackerman, Griskevicius and Li, 2011; Harrison and Shortall, 2011) men more often reported saying “I love you” first. The first person and the single-gender framing are gone. Second, it credited the idea that vulnerability is offered first to someone judged safe to Brené Brown's popular work; the finding with evidence behind it is Collins and Miller's 1994 meta-analysis showing that people disclose more to those they already like, which is now in its place. Third, it attributed to Bowlby's framework a process of “social broadening” in which a partner joins someone's “attachment map”; we could not find that concept in Bowlby's work, and the section now rests on the social-network research of Felmlee (2001) and Sprecher and Felmlee (1992). Fourth, it attributed to Hazan and Shaver the claim that secure attraction channels arousal towards approach, which is not in their 1987 paper, and presented a popular book's description of calm as the mark of real attraction as research; there is no study showing either, and the article now says so. The rewrite is built on primary sources throughout, including Aron, Paris and Aron (1995) on self-concept change when falling in love, Laurenceau, Barrett and Pietromonaco (1998) and Maisel and Gable (2009) on responsiveness, Huang and colleagues (2017) on follow-up questions, Agnew and colleagues (1998) on plural pronouns and commitment, Stanley and Markman (1992) and Le and Agnew (2003) on commitment, Gable and colleagues (2004, 2006) on responses to good news, and Bradford, Feeney and Campbell (2002) on attachment avoidance and disclosure. A safety note and support lines now open the article, and a section names jealousy and isolation as warning signs of control rather than signs of love. The title changed from “10 Subtle Signs He's Secretly Falling For You”. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-27
Full rewrite, and four problems fixed. First, the article was written as first-person experience — an author who had made seven of the ten mistakes, worn the wrong outfit and learned about loud venues the hard way. Those experiences were a writing device, not anyone's, and have been removed. Second, it listed Mehrabian's Silent Messages (1971) among its sources; that work concerns how people judge feelings from inconsistent words and tone of voice and does not support any claim on the page. Third, it attributed to Gottman's research a finding that presence — how much of you is in the room — predicts relational success, used to argue against mentioning an ex; we could not locate that finding in his published work, and we found no study at all that tests mentioning an ex on a first date, which the article now says. Fourth, it advised talking less, when the only experiment on the question (Hirschi, Wilson and Gilbert, 2022) found that people assigned to speak more were liked more; and its conclusion told readers to keep the phone in a pocket, advice the same article had already retracted in its phone section in September. The rewrite is built on primary sources throughout, including Huang and colleagues (2017) on follow-up questions and second dates, Sprecher and colleagues (2013) on turn-taking, Wortman and colleagues (1976) on the timing of disclosure, Human and colleagues (2012) on positive self-presentation, the ego-depletion replications of 2016 and 2021, Boothby and colleagues (2018) on the liking gap, Foster and colleagues (1998) and Meston and Frohlich (2003) on arousal and attraction, Lehmann, Elliot and Calin-Jageman (2018) on the red effect, Joel, Teper and MacDonald (2014) on reluctance to reject, and Joel, Eastwick and Finkel (2017) on the unpredictability of initial attraction. A safety note and support lines now open the article. The title changed from “11 First Date Mistakes That Quietly Kill Attraction”. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-19
Full rewrite, and four problems fixed — one of which was a piece of advice rather than a citation. First, the article told readers to stop initiating for two weeks and see what happened, and treated the result as informative. Baxter and Wilmot (1984) catalogued that behaviour forty years ago as a separation test, one of seven clusters of indirect strategies people use to find out where they stand without asking, and the objection to it is not only that it is manipulative: two weeks of silence is equally consistent with indifference, with a partner matching the withdrawal, with a difficult fortnight, and with correctly reading the withdrawal as a message. The advice has been removed and the study is now in the article. Second, the article explained vague future plans by saying that Helen Fisher’s brain-imaging research describes the neural systems involved in planning reorganising around a specific person, so that running future scenarios becomes almost involuntary. The study is Aron, Fisher, Mashek, Strong, Li and Brown (2005), which scanned 10 women and 7 men while they viewed a photograph of their partner alternating with a photograph of a familiar person, and reported activation in dopamine-rich reward areas. It contains nothing about future planning. The same claim appeared in “10 Subtle Signs He’s Secretly Falling For You” and has been removed there too. Third, an FAQ answer stated that for anxiously attached people the neurological cost of sustained undefined intimacy is measurably higher; no study establishing that could be found, and the sentence is gone. What the evidence does support is narrower and is now in its place: attachment anxiety was associated with being the more committed partner in an asymmetrically committed relationship (Stanley and colleagues, 2019). Fourth, another FAQ answer described Gottman’s work on openness to influence as showing that willingness to be changed by a partner is one of the strongest predictors of relationship health — the same overstatement this site corrected in three other articles on 15 September, since the original result (Gottman, Coan, Carrere and Swanson, 1998) did not replicate in Kim, Capaldi and Crosby’s community sample. The rewrite is built on primary sources throughout, including Langlais, Podberesky, Toohey and Lee (2024), the first study to define situationships empirically; its 2025 follow-up on why people stay in them; Baxter and Wilmot (1985) on the state of the relationship being the most pervasive taboo topic between close people; Stanley, Rhoades, Scott, Kelmer, Markman and Fincham (2017) on asymmetrically committed relationships in 315 unmarried couples; Sprecher, Schmeeckle and Felmlee (2006) on unequal emotional involvement; Stanley, Rhoades and Markman (2006) on sliding rather than deciding; Bisson and Levine (2009) on avoided relational negotiation; and Koessler, Kohut and Campbell (2019) on ghosting. A safety note and support lines now open the article. The first-person framing has been removed, here and in a section of “Signs You Have Actually Moved On (And Signs You Have Not)”. The title changed from “8 Signs You’re in a Situationship (Not a Relationship)”. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-17
Full rewrite, with one misattributed study, one unlocatable statistic and two unsourced claims corrected — three of which also appeared in other articles. First, the article stated that “relationship power attenuated the effects of gratitude on perceived partner responsiveness and satisfaction in one study”, and cited for it a paper listed under the wrong lead author. The study in question is Barton, Jenkins, Gong, Sutton and Beach (2022), a three-wave study of 316 African American couples, and it contains no such finding; what it does report — that perceived gratitude buffered the effects of ineffective arguing and financial strain while expressed gratitude did not — is now in the article instead. Second, the article asserted that the rate of turning toward small bids “separated couples who were still together years later from those who were not”. That claim, usually carrying the figures 86% and 33%, could not be located in the peer-reviewed papers that report the bids coding system: Driver and Gottman (2004) coded a ten-minute dinnertime segment for 49 newlywed couples, and Gottman and Driver (2005) 50 couples, and neither reports divorce outcomes. The earliest widely read source for the percentages is a 2014 Atlantic article, which gives them as 87% and 33%. The article now says what those papers do report, and the same claim has been qualified where it appeared in “Signs A New Relationship Has Real Potential” and “Signs He's Secretly Falling For You”. Third, the claim that the success of a repair attempt “depends far less on its elegance than on whether the other person accepts it”, and that clumsy repairs land where regard is intact, had no source; it has been replaced here and in “Signs A New Relationship Has Real Potential” with what Gottman, Driver and Tabares (2015) actually coded — that repairs offered in the first three minutes and aimed at the emotional climate rather than at the disagreement were the ones that worked. Fourth, the section on “love maps” has been removed: it presented a clinical concept from a popular book as a research finding about couples who last, and we could not find a study testing it.
- 2026-09-16
Full rewrite, and five unsupported claims retired. The previous version was a list of nine signals resting on five references — Mehrabian (1971), Eibl-Eibesfeldt on the eyebrow flash, Hess on pupil size, Hazan and Shaver (1987) and a popular book by Helen Fisher — none of which is about telling flirting from friendliness, and none of which supported a specific sentence. The claims removed are: that remembering small details is a romantic tell because “memory is downstream of caring”, for which we could find no study; a test based on how someone behaves when another attractive person arrives, which had no evidence and invited reading possessiveness as interest; that whether someone makes it easy for you to leave is diagnostic, which had no source; a description of Gottman’s research on teasing in couples that was never tied to a paper; and an FAQ answer treating small grooming gestures as involuntary signs of attraction, when primping showed no relation to liking in the largest meta-analysis (Montoya, Kershaw and Prosser, 2018). One idea from the old page survives because it turned out to have evidence it never cited: that interest shows up as selectivity rather than intensity, now resting on Eastwick, Finkel, Mochon and Ariely (2007), where unique desire was reciprocated (r = .14) and desiring everyone predicted being desired less (r = −.41). The rewrite is built on primary sources throughout, including Farris, Treat, Viken and McFall (2008), in which both men and women misread sexual interest as friendliness far more often than the reverse; Henningsen (2004) and Henningsen, Braz and Davies (2008) on flirting motives that are not courtship; Hall and Xing (2014) on polite flirts becoming more reserved when attracted; Koenig, Kirkpatrick and Ketelaar (2007) on projection between friends; Li and colleagues (2009) and Keltner and colleagues (2001) on humour and teasing; and Jozkowski and colleagues (2014) on consent. A safety note and support lines now open the article. The first-person framing has been removed. The title changed from “Flirting or Just Friendly? How to Tell the Difference”. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-15
Full rewrite, and one sourcing failure and one overstated finding fixed — the second of which also required correcting three other articles. The previous version rested on five references, one of which was the website of the institute that sells Emotionally Focused Therapy training rather than a study, cited in support of a claim about what that therapy is built on. An organisation's own promotional page is not a source. In its place the article now reports what a 2026 systematic review found when it applied the Chambless criteria across 40 eligible studies: no couple therapy model met the standards for strong empirical support, and seven — including emotionally focused and Gottman method — showed modest support, with insufficient sample size and lack of independent replication the most common limitations. Separately, the article presented accepting a partner's influence as an established predictor of relationship outcomes. The original result (Gottman, Coan, Carrere and Swanson, 1998; 130 newlywed couples over six years) failed to replicate when Kim, Capaldi and Crosby tested the same models on a new community sample of 85 couples: men's rejection of their partners' influence, the absence of de-escalation, and women's negative start-up did not predict relationship status. Heyman and Smith Slep had already shown in 2001 that divorce-prediction accuracy collapses without crossvalidation. The same overstatement appeared in “The Habits of Couples Who Stay Together”, “Flirting or Just Friendly?” and “10 Subtle Signs He's Secretly Falling For You”, all three of which now carry the replication failure. The rewrite is built on primary sources throughout, including Ross and colleagues (2019) on socioeconomic moderation of demand and withdraw, McNulty and Russell (2010) on direct negativity being adaptive when problems are severe, Johnson and colleagues (2022) on communication covarying with rather than predicting satisfaction within couples, McNulty (2010, 2011) on the costs of forgiveness without accountability, and Dagan and colleagues (2024) on narrative coherence predicting adult relationship adjustment at r = 0.17. The title changed from “What Emotional Maturity Looks Like In A Relationship”. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-14
Full rewrite, and one reporting error fixed in two places. The article claimed that positive emotions make it easier to include another person in the self, and then described the study it cited — Waugh and Fredrickson (2006) — as having “hypothesised” exactly that, without ever saying what the study found. A hypothesis presented as a conclusion is a defect regardless of how it turns out, and in this case it turned out to be supported: the study followed 147 first-year students with 28 days of daily emotion reports and found positive emotions predicting self-other overlap with a new roommate (β = 0.25 with extraversion and negative emotions controlled; β = 0.17 prospectively, controlling for earlier overlap). The finding is now stated with its numbers and with the limit that the targets were randomly assigned roommates rather than romantic partners. The same sentence appeared in “The Signs a New Relationship Has Real Potential” and has been corrected there too. The rest of the page rested on five references, none of which supported a specific sentence; it is now built on primary sources throughout, including Eastwick and Hunt (2014) on consensus decaying into uniqueness, Hunt, Eastwick and Finkel (2015) on attractiveness matching falling away past roughly nine months of prior acquaintance — reported here with the authors’ own robustness check, which drops the effect to non-significance on one measure if twenty outlying couples are capped rather than excluded — Joel and colleagues (2020) on the 11,196-couple project, and the Aron and colleagues (2000) seven-minute experiments, now stated alongside the preregistered virtual-reality studies (Balzarini, Sharma and Muise, 2025) that moved boredom and closeness but produced no main effects on self-expansion or relationship satisfaction. Two unsourced assertions from the earlier version — that the evidence for strategic unavailability is thin, and that playing hard to get relies on anxiety mistaken for interest — are now carried by Walster and colleagues (1973), whose first five experiments failed, and Dai, Dong and Jia (2014). The title changed from “What Actually Builds Attraction Over Time”. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-13
Full rewrite, and two claims retired. The article stated that removing eye contact lowers the intensity of an exchange, offered as the explanation for why difficult conversations happen while walking, driving or washing up — “which is why the car is where families historically say things”. The observation about where people talk may well be right; the explanation was presented as established and is not. The nearest research is Argyle and Dean’s 1965 equilibrium account of how gaze and proximity trade off, and a line of work on gaze aversion under cognitive load conducted largely with children answering difficult questions. Neither tested whether adults disclose more when the face is removed, and we could find no study that has. The article also called oversharing “frequently the same avoidance wearing different clothes” — a claim about a discloser’s motives, where the disclosure literature measures listeners’ reactions. Cozby (1972) found a high discloser was liked less and rated as less well-adjusted; it says nothing about why the person was disclosing. Both claims are removed. The rewrite is built on primary sources throughout: Laurenceau, Feldman Barrett and Pietromonaco (1998), whose diary data show emotional disclosure predicting intimacy at β = .37 while factual disclosure predicts nothing; Collins and Miller’s (1994) meta-analysis; Sprecher and Treger (2015) on turn-taking; and Aron and colleagues (1997), now reported with the parts usually left out — that the authors describe the effect as a temporary feeling of closeness rather than a relationship, that Studies 2 and 3 are null results, and that the “falling in love” claim traces to a parenthetical remark about one pair in an earlier pilot. The title changed from “How People Actually Open Up”. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-12
Full rewrite, and two unsourced claims retired. The article asserted that anxiously attached people are drawn to avoidant partners because intermittent reinforcement — connection, then distance, then connection — is “more neurologically activating” than consistent warmth, that the reward system responds more strongly to variable reinforcement schedules, and that this is therefore “a feature of how reward circuits work” rather than an error. We could not find a study establishing that for romantic partner selection. The underlying learning and dopamine research exists; the step linking a variable schedule of a partner’s warmth to preferring or selecting that partner does not, and the sources that assert it cite no primary research. The claim is removed, and the nearest real evidence — Whitchurch, Wilson and Gilbert (2011), in which women uncertain whether men liked them were the most attracted, mediated by thinking about them more — is now stated with its limits: one small laboratory study, one sex, undergraduates, profiles rather than people. The article also stated, without a source, that people who have had at least one long-term reciprocal friendship show more security in romantic relationships even controlling for attachment history; that claim is removed. A third section said that “people tend to select partners whose regard for them approximately matches their own self-regard”; the underlying finding is Swann, De La Ronde and Hixon (1994), whose result is stage-dependent in a way the old text reversed — dating participants were most intimate with partners who evaluated them favourably, and only married participants were most intimate with spouses who verified their self-views. The rewrite is built on primary sources throughout, including Park and MacDonald (2019) on whether people have a “type”, and it now states that nothing in that study establishes the pattern is a choice. The first-person framing of the previous version has been removed. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-11
Full rewrite, following the partial retraction of 10 September logged below. The article now rests only on sources a reader can check: Rosenfeld, Thomas and Hausen (2019) on how couples meet; Pew Research Center (2022 fieldwork) and SSRS (January 2026) on app use; Match Group’s 2025 annual report to the SEC for what the owner of Tinder and Hinge actually discloses; Cacioppo and colleagues (2013) and Rosenfeld (2017) on whether relationships that start online differ; the Census Bureau, Pew and the National Center for Family & Marriage Research on partnering and divorce; the General Social Survey on sexual inactivity; and the American Time Use Survey on time with friends. The three claims removed on 10 September for lack of a source were re-examined against primary data rather than restored as written. Marital happiness changing little is now attributed to Amato, Johnson, Booth and Rogers (2003), with the limit that their data end in 2000. The fall in intimate partner violence — 64% from 1994 to 2010, per the Bureau of Justice Statistics — is now stated alongside the Bureau’s most recent report, which shows the rate rising from 1.7 to 2.7 per 1,000 between 2020 and 2024; the earlier sentence saying it has fallen would have been out of date even with a source. The claim that relationships are more equitable is now limited to what Pew measured — about equal earnings in 29% of opposite-sex marriages — together with Pew’s finding that wives in those marriages still spend more time on caregiving and housework. The Surgeon General’s 2023 loneliness advisory, removed on 10 September because it could not be retrieved, has been checked against a copy on NCBI Bookshelf and against the studies it cites, and the article now says what its headline figure rests on. The median age at first marriage is updated to the Census Bureau’s 2025 estimate. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-10
Retraction, and the most serious one on this page. Under the heading “The official numbers first,” this article reported that Pew Research Center had surveyed Americans in 2023 and found that roughly 1 in 4 adults under 30 had been in a relationship neither person had defined; that about 38% of adults who had dated in the previous five years described at least one of those relationships as ambiguous; that people gave reasons for not defining a relationship at rates of 41%, 37% and 29%; and that about 1 in 5 of those who preferred ambiguity had been hurt by a previous undefined relationship. Pew Research Center published none of those figures, and has not asked about undefined relationships at all. The numbers were not misread from a Pew report or taken from the wrong year — they do not correspond to any question Pew has fielded. The URL cited for them, pewresearch.org/internet/2023/02/02/online-dating-in-america/, is not the address of any Pew report. A further section presented an account of what people post on r/dating_advice and r/situationships as though reading threads were a source. All of it has been removed. The article has been rewritten against the surveys that do exist — YouGov’s January 2024 survey of 1,110 US adults, and Daniel A. Cox and Kelsey Eyre Hammond’s “Romantic Recession” for the Survey Center on American Life, fielded on 5,837 adults in August 2024 — and against the relational uncertainty literature, whose central prediction failed under test in 2001 and whose proposed mechanism failed to mediate in 2004. Both failures are now stated in the article. The correction is repeated inside the piece rather than only here. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-10
Retraction. Three separate problems, found while correcting the article above. First: this page reported that Pew Research Center’s 2023 dating survey found apps accounted for about 22% of how recent couples met, friends or family for about 29%, and work and school for another 18%, with further breakdowns by age. Pew has published no such breakdown, and the same non-existent Pew URL was cited. That section has been replaced with the study that did measure it — Rosenfeld, Thomas and Hausen (2019) in PNAS, from a nationally representative 2017 survey, which found that meeting online became the most common way heterosexual couples in the US meet, overtaking meeting through friends around 2013. Second: the article cited a 2024 Hinge annual report showing most active users had not been on a date through the app in three months, and a Match Group conversion funnel from match to second date. Neither could be located in any public source; both are removed, and the section now says plainly that the platforms publish no auditable outcome data. Third: a section on loneliness attributed several statistics to the US Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory, and three claims about relationship quality over time — that satisfaction has not declined, that intimate partner violence has fallen, that relationships are more equitable than forty years ago — carried no source. None could be verified here, so all were removed rather than kept with a hedge. The figure for age at first marriage has been updated to the Census Bureau’s 2024 estimate (30.2 for men, 28.6 for women); the previous version gave 28.2 and 30.0 as 2023 data. The article is shorter than it was and is queued for a full rewrite. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-02
Retraction. The entry on phones opened by calling a phone visible on the table “the one mistake with actual data behind it rather than folklore” and told readers to put it in a bag rather than face-down. That is the mere-presence effect from Przybylski and Weinstein’s 2013 experiments, and it has not replicated: Courtright and Caplan pooled six mere-presence studies with 601 participants and found an average correlation of −.20 that was not statistically significant, and Linares and Sellier’s direct replication with 356 participants reported no movement on any original relationship measure. The section has been rewritten around the behaviour that does have evidence — picking the phone up during the conversation — and now says what it previously got wrong. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-02
Two corrections in the same section. It stated that “the average person checks their phone around 90 times a day”, a figure with no source attached; the closest logged measurement we can find recorded a mean of 84.68 unlocks a day in 23 participants, in a study whose actual point is that people’s own estimates of that number do not correlate with reality at all. The figure has been removed. The section also presented a phone left face-up rather than face-down as a readable signal, which is the mere-presence claim retracted in the first-date-mistakes entry above, and cited Mehrabian’s implicit-communication work in support of reading it — the same misuse of those experiments corrected here on 1 September. The section now covers phone use during the conversation, which is the part the research supports. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-09-01
Rewritten in full because four of its claims did not hold up against the sources. It opened with foot direction as a reliable cue, which has never been tested: it is absent from Montoya, Kershaw and Prosser's meta-analysis of 309 effect sizes and from Hall and Xing's coding of 36 behaviours, and traces to popular body-language books rather than to research. It credited the eyebrow flash to Eckhard Hess, who did not study it, and read it as an attraction signal; the cross-cultural work is by Grammer, Schiefenhövel, Schleidt, Lorenz and Eibl-Eibesfeldt, it documents a greeting and recognition display, and Montoya's synthesis places eyebrow raises among the behaviours with no evidence of a relation to liking. It treated pupil dilation as an attraction signal, where Bradley and colleagues show the pupil indexes arousal and dilates for unpleasant images too. And it cited Mehrabian's implicit-communication work as general support for reading the body over the words, which is the standard misuse of two 1967 experiments about conflicting cues. Open body posture and leaning in, also presented as tells, are on the same null list. The URL is unchanged.
- 2026-08-31
In-article correction added to the section on unconscious mirroring, which described behavioural synchrony as a reliable correlate of felt interest. Grammer, Kruck and Magnusson state in their abstract that they were unable to demonstrate a relation between synchronisation defined as movement echo or position mirroring and the subjective experience of interest. The correction was published the same day the contradicting source appeared in another article on this site, and the full rewrite followed on 1 September.
- 2026-05-13Site-wide editorial pass
Expanded all 21 English articles with additional explanation, examples, and citations. No factual corrections — this was a depth-and-clarity update across the catalogue. The previously shorter versions are no longer live; the canonical URLs are unchanged.