About
Field studies conducted by the two authors in 1996 ("The London Escapades") have led to the empirical insight that there is various (yet describable if not predictable) factors influencing ones success during a night "out on the pull", i.e. success in chatting up a male or female. Hence the term 'pullability' was created, a measure of 'probability to pull'.
The authors invested their time and knowledge to disentangle the different variables determining the "pull ability" of a certain person at a certain time and how those variables weigh in on the final value of 'pullability'. These determining variables and their integration can obviously not be regarded as exclusive and terminatory, nor have the empirical observations been extensive enough to prove the validity and reliability of such variables beyond v=0.4 and r=0.6. The pullability-index is still a project in progress.'Pullability' ranges from 0 to 1, 0 resulting in an almost guaranteed unsuccessful night out and 1 letting the males/females flock around you for you to pick. While this value is actually a measure of absolute pullability, it can be argued that it is, to this stage, more functional to use it as a relative pullability. If, on one night, the calculated pullability is 0.1, one can regard a subsequent night of 0.5 as "five times as successful", rather than as a "50 percent chance to pull
Biological point of view
Even though mankind has evolved towards capability of culture, consciousness and such, reproductive processes are still (in the scientific world) widely believed to be regulated hormonally and subconsciously. Body language, pheromones, body-part proportions, social dominance and submissiveness in groups take control of the ways a population can sustain itself. Reproduction is "too vital and too constitutive to be governed by something as feeble as the human mind" (Baxter 1999). Hence the authors has empirically tested parameters and assessed them in order to fit them into the "pullability"-formula.Technology
The pullability is obtained from a set of subjective partial and priori probabilities, these are functions based upon the authors' experiences and empirical experiments carried out over a ten year period. Linear, logarithmic and Gaussian probability functions are in many cases used and sometimes composite functions. The partial probabilities are processed by a Bayesian smoother after which they are fed in to a Naïve Bayesian Network (the partial probabilities are assumed to be independent). The Bayesian Network combines the partial probabilities and calculates the probability of a successful pull, the pullability. Formal representation of the Bayesian part to calculate the pullability: