Sixty-four percent of people say they’ve experienced “the ick,” that sudden, visceral loss of attraction over something as small as how a date laughs or texts — and according to a peer-reviewed study published in Personality and Individual Differences, how often you get hit with it has less to do with your date’s behavior than with two specific traits in you: narcissism and perfectionism. Researchers Brian Collisson, Eliana Saunders, and Chloe Yin of Azusa Pacific University turned a viral TikTok phenomenon into an actual measured psychological pattern, and the pattern points inward more than it points at whoever just lost their appeal by dangling their feet off a chair.
Where the Research Came From
Collisson’s team didn’t start from a hunch. They first pulled 86 TikTok videos tagged #theick to catalog the kinds of behaviors people commonly cite as triggers, then built a study around 125 single adults — 74 men and 51 women, ages 24 to 72 — who rated how likely they’d be to feel the ick in response to specific behaviors, completed standard personality assessments for disgust sensitivity, narcissism, and a trait called other-oriented perfectionism, and answered questions about their own dating history. The goal, as coverage of the findings in PsyPost put it, was to test whether the ick is really just a reaction to bad behavior, or whether some people are simply wired to catch it more easily than others.
What Actually Predicts It
The results split the traits apart in an interesting way. Disgust sensitivity predicted how likely someone was to feel the ick at all, but not how often. Narcissism worked similarly — it predicted likelihood, tied to a tendency to reject partners over perceived imperfections, but not frequency. The trait that predicted both likelihood and frequency, and came out as the single strongest predictor in the whole study, was other-oriented perfectionism: holding partners to exacting, often unstated standards and reacting sharply when they fall short. People high in that trait weren’t just more likely to get the ick once. They were more likely to keep getting it, repeatedly, across different partners and different situations — which starts to look less like bad luck in who they’re dating and more like a pattern they’re bringing into every date.
What Happens After the Ick Hits
The study also tracked what people actually did once the feeling showed up, and the split is revealing on its own. Twenty-six percent ended the relationship immediately. Forty-two percent ended things later, after the ick had lingered. Thirty-two percent stayed in the relationship despite it. And a striking 92% talked about the experience with someone else — friends, group chats, social media — meaning the ick isn’t usually a private, quietly-processed moment. It’s something people narrate, often immediately, which may be part of why it has become such a recognizable cultural shorthand in the first place: it’s built to be talked about.
The Triggers Weren’t Identical for Everyone
The study also found the ick doesn’t land the same way across genders, which reinforces the idea that it’s shaped as much by the person feeling it as by any universal list of dealbreakers. Women in the sample were significantly more likely to recognize the term “the ick” and to report having experienced it, and the specific behaviors that set it off diverged, too: women more often pointed to misogynistic comments and grating speech patterns, while men were more likely to cite vanity and overly trend-chasing behavior. If the ick were purely an objective reaction to bad conduct, you’d expect more overlap in what actually triggers it. The gender split suggests something more subjective is doing a lot of the work — each person’s own sensitivities deciding what counts as disqualifying in the first place.
Why This Complicates How We Talk About the Ick
Online, the ick tends to get treated as objective evidence — proof the other person did something disqualifying. This study suggests that framing gets the causality partly backwards for a meaningful share of cases. If other-oriented perfectionism is the strongest predictor of how often someone experiences it, then a person who reports getting the ick constantly, across a string of otherwise reasonable partners, may be looking at a pattern worth examining in themselves rather than concluding that an unusual number of people happen to be disqualifyingly annoying. That’s not the same as saying the ick is never a legitimate signal — plenty of the triggers people describe (rudeness, dishonesty, disrespect toward service workers) are reasonable reasons to lose interest in someone. It’s that the sheer frequency of the reaction, more than any single instance of it, is where someone’s own traits start showing up in the data.
What the research ultimately offers isn’t a way to explain away every ick, but a more honest question to sit with when it hits again: is this about what they just did, or about a standard no one was ever going to meet.
