their relationship with the potential mate. Female speed daters noted male negative characteristics rather quickly, and were generally more critical. This could mean that males were more open-minded or at least slower to identify the negative characteristics, meaning that they were less reactive in comparison to females when doing thin slicing. While both sexes were equally good in making positive evaluations about their partners, females made more specific descriptions than males, and males might engage in observing the superficial if they only noticed negative characteristics in the beginning of the date. Still, the overall result showed that speed dating did make the participants look more favorable in each other's eyes. Social media profiles Thin-slicing is a phenomenon that can occur virtually as well through contact with an individual's online profile. Online profiles are essentially made up of several different condensed sections that reveal different aspects of a person's life and interests. Microsoft researchers Kristin Stecher and Scott Counts investigated this domain of thin-slicing to determine exactly how much information was needed on the online profiles for viewers to form an accurate impression of the individual and which profile fields contribute most to the ability to form that impression. They focused on two forms of social media domains: general social networking sites such as Facebook and Friendster, and blogging sites. The predictiveness of an attribute was defined as its ability to contribute to a viewer's ability to form a predictive impression of the subject. For social media sites, information such as the individual's photo, name, status, high school and gender allowed raters to form predictive impressions while for blogging sites, this predictive information included the individual's photo, religious views, current town, employer and number of groups. Thus, while users can use thin slices of information gathered from these online profiles to form an impression of the subject, the impression is severely impacted by the type of attributes that are presented on the profile as well as the different ways they are processed based on user goals. Sexual orientation In 1999, Nalini Ambady et al. studied the accuracy of judgments of sexual orientation from thin slices of behavior. After taking variables such as the gender and sexual orientation of the judges and the gender of the targets into consideration, Ambady reached the conclusion that people could accurately perceive sexual orientation through thin slicing. Approximately 55% of the judgments based on still photo