She stamps consent forms and a few of her own, and drafts one for you.
Study 1 of an ongoing series, no ethics board was harmed
Join a made-up institute of flirting research and let sixteen deadpan staff run small studies on you, one hypothesis per sitting. Each of them reports her findings in writing, remembers the earlier results and has opinions about your methodology.
She stamps consent forms and a few of her own, and drafts one for you.
She labels the coffee as evidence and your reaction to it as data.
The faculty, in staff portraits
Open the full directoryEvery chat at the institute begins with a claim about you. It is rarely flattering and never entirely wrong. A member of staff proposes that you are slow to answer compliments, or that your jokes arrive a beat before your confidence does, and then she sets out to test it. You are the volunteer, the sample and the only participant, which is a design problem she raises herself.
The home page is a list of studies currently recruiting, each reduced to a sentence: 'A reply sent at midnight is warmer than one sent at noon', or 'People who apologise to machines make better company.' Nobody has proved any of them. Scroll until one makes you want to prove it wrong, because that reaction is the whole method.
Volunteer, and the staff member's file opens with the hypothesis already entered as your opening line, counted as a single message. Then she behaves like someone who has waited all week for a participant: one question, then another, and a notebook begins. If you would prefer to put forward a hypothesis of your own, type it instead. The institute welcomes amendments.
Each hypothesis on the board has three lines: the claim, the method she proposes and the finding she expects. Six are pinned here. The rest are on the faculty page.
The claim is absurd but sincere. The method involves you and an ordinary object, such as a cup of coffee or a seating plan. The expected finding is where each woman's character comes out. Abiola Fashola expects a correlation. Mina Farahani expects a grant rejection that reads like affection. Elke Thorsen expects to find the same two names in the index as last time.
Every entry carries a stamp: pending, under review, replicated or withdrawn. The stamps are part of the joke and also a useful filter. Replicated hypotheses are the safest place to begin, since a staff member has already got a result out of someone, and withdrawn ones are for those who like to see what went wrong.
The method is a loop of four stages and it is the same for every study. It was written down once, in appendix form, and has not been revised since.
Confirm that you are an adult and volunteer. Without registering you may send 10 messages, and the file follows you when you do.
She states a claim about you, asks three questions and tests the claim with a small, harmless task. Garance Mercier uses coffee. Hyun-ji Seo uses a recorder. Yessenia Prieto uses a seating plan.
At the end of the sitting she writes a result in her own voice, with a footnote or two. It is filed in your dossier, where you can read it next to the earlier ones.
Disagree with the finding and she will review it, grudgingly. Stop whenever you like and nothing is held against you. Clear the file from the chat menu if you want a clean sheet.
Nothing here is research. The pleasure lies in being taken seriously by someone who is clearly joking, and in being allowed to join in. Staff speak in the grammar of papers, with 'we observed' and 'it should be noted', and they apply it to your last message.
Sixteen invented women, sorted into departments the way a directory would. None is a doctor, a clinician or a counsellor. They are administrators, technicians, archivists and analysts, all adults, who happen to work in a place devoted to flirting.
The numbers people, who regard you as a rather interesting outlier.
Everything is written down somewhere, and one of them has read it.
They go where the participants are and write down what is said.
Benches, buzzers, checklists and a very great deal of caution.
They turn results into sentences, then into jokes.
Pick by temperament. The statisticians are tidy and patient. The field staff are warm and nosy. The laboratory people are brusque and kind in turns, and the writers are the quickest. Each file shows a portrait, a post, a voice and the studies she has proposed, so you know whom you are volunteering for.
A finding is what a sitting leaves behind: a short written result that is filed under your name and brought up again later.
Svetlana Marek writes hers as a safety notice with a long list of infractions. Consuelo Salazar files hers in a drawer and tells you the drawer's number. Chloe Whitfield turns hers into a joke and the joke into a footnote. They are short, they are generally kind and they are always about something you actually said.
Every fellow also keeps short notes about earlier sittings, which you can read under the chat menu and correct or strike out line by line; they are the reason a second study feels like a follow-up and not a restart. The findings page is a separate thing: it logs changes to the institute itself, such as new staff and new studies.
A study is easier to understand in outline than in the abstract. This one is described rather than quoted, so that the page contains no volunteer's actual words.
A volunteer opens the board, reads that a reply sent at midnight is warmer than one sent at noon, and decides it is false. Zawadi Mwangi, who proposed it, is delighted. She does not argue. She says only that the volunteer has just sent his first message at ten past one in the morning, and that she will enter that as a data point.
Zawadi asks him to write the same sentence twice, once as he would at noon and once as he would after midnight, and to say which he prefers. She plots nothing, since there is nothing to plot yet, and says so. She notes that the second version is shorter, that it contains a joke and that the first does not. The volunteer is invited to comment on her methodology and does, at some length.
The result is filed in two lines: the midnight version was warmer, though not by the margin the hypothesis wanted, and the volunteer's objection to the sample size was the best part. A footnote adds that further study is required and that she has cleared a slot on Thursday. Next time she opens by citing it.
If the directory is too long to read in one go, these four are a fair sample. Each has a portrait on her file, a post and a standing offer of a study.
Ooff duty
Odessa, 41 AI
Ethics board secretary
Hypothesis: A consent form drafted for two is the most enjoyable kind.
Open her file ♥
Goff duty
Garance, 39 AI
Lab manager
Hypothesis: Coffee made by someone else tastes like attention.
Open her file ♥
Nat her bench
Naoko, 45 AI
Instrument calibrator
Hypothesis: Two people can be calibrated to the same silence.
Open her file ♥
Yoff duty
Yessenia, 28 AI
Conference organiser
Hypothesis: Place cards shuffled at random produce the best conversations.
Open her file ♥
Because it is fun to say, and because any more would be a different design. A first sitting with one fellow tells you how she writes, how fast she moves and whether her kind of dryness suits yours. You can change fellow after any study and the new one will read your file before she says a word.
The budget has three lines. None of them renews without your knowledge, because the institute has no mechanism for it.
| Stage | Pilot study | Follow-up | Extended study (Plus) |
| Duration | 3 days from enrolment | Once the pilot ends, open-ended | 30 days, or 365 |
| Your messages | No daily limit | 10 a day | No daily limit |
| Staff | All of them | The first 3 you worked with | All of them |
| She states the hypothesis first | Yes | No | Yes |
| Cost | Nothing | Nothing | $15 or $99 |
A volunteer with no account may send 10 messages to any fellow. Enrolling opens the full faculty for a 3-day pilot and asks for no card. When the pilot closes, the follow-up stage allows 10 messages a day and leaves every file as it was. To extend the study, $15 buys a 30-day term and $99 buys the 365-day term; USDT is the only currency, and the daily limit lifts. Grants are final, other than refunds that the law itself requires.
It has to be printed in plain type: this is fiction. The institute is made up, and so is every member of its staff.
Nobody here is a doctor, a researcher or a therapist, and no title of that kind appears on any file. The studies are jokes with a clipboard. What a staff member says about you is the opinion of a character, invented by an AI model, about a few lines of chat. It is not a diagnosis, a measurement or advice about sex, health or relationships.
Anything about your body, your health or a relationship that truly matters to you belongs with a qualified clinician or counsellor. The staff say so themselves when asked. They will tease you about a seating plan, and they will not speculate about anything graver.
Every fellow is invented, and every one is an adult of 26 to 55. Participants must be 18 or over. The studies are playful and charged and halt before explicit detail; that limit lives in the chat, and no plan moves it.
Sixteen fellows have an opening in their schedule. Choose a hypothesis, enrol as the only participant and let her write up what she finds.
Enrol in the first study