Published with permission from Business Insider.

For those of you who still believe in pastel hearts and Taylor Swift songs, the statisticians at OKcupid have come up with a winning first-date strategy. It’s a list of questions that are statistically proven to suggest key details about your unknown dinner companion without making things too awkward.

Here’s the methodology that OKCupid used to come up with its definitive list.

To determine “What questions are easy to bring up, yet correlate to the deeper, unspeakable, issues people actually care about,” OKCupid began by pulling from its database of 275,294 user-submitted match questions.

This pool of questions was then separated into “viable first-date questions”  — mostly to eliminate queries like “Are clams alive?” and “Are you better looking than most people?”

The list of “viable first-date questions” was then broken down by privacy (based on whether or not users clicked “Answer Question Privately” when asked the question online) and diversity of answers. The ideal questions were those that people did not consider private (i.e. casual topics) and led to a high diversity of answers (i.e. tells you something about the person).

Now, without further ado…

Click here for the four questions >

Read more at BusinessInsider.com >