The paper says “men formed favourable impressions and showed greater interest in women who displayed more (versus less) intelligence than themselves”.

However, the subjects “distanced themselves” when faced with meeting and interacting with the women who had outperformed them, and "tended to rate her as less attractive, and showed less desire to exchange contact information or plan a date with her.”

The study, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, qualified the results by saying more study would be needed, and obviously the sample group is small, but went as far as to say it appeared “feelings of diminished masculinity accounted for men’s decreased attraction toward women”.

Presumably the participants then realised two of the three authors of the study were female and ran screaming for the hills.

Men like the idea of dating intelligent women, but are intimidated in reality, new study suggests