Psychology researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara are doing just that: uploading personalities and relationship decisions into simulated characters and letting them play those decisions out in a virtual world.

Forty to 50 percent of the time the IRL couples end up as couples in the simulated world. This also means that 40 to 50 percent of the time, couples do not match back up. Exactly why is at the heart of assistant professor Daniel Conroy-Beam’s research. In the future, this information could be used to help people build happier relationships, Conroy-Beam tells Inverse.

Conroy-Beam is head of the Computational Mate Choice Lab at UCSB. His research involves analyzing what decisions and rules people use when choosing a romantic partner. Conroy-Beam has pursued this area of study for the past seven years but was finally able to publish the first of his findings in January 2021.