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March 14, 2023
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March 14, 2023Modern Love: Scientific Insights from 21st Century Dating
The modern world provides two new ways to find love — online matchmaking and speed dating. In the last few years, these methods have moved from a last resort for the loveless to a more accepted way for millions to try to meet their mates.
While this has led to dates, relationships and marriages around the globe, it has also been a boon for enterprising researchers — providing huge datasets chronicling real world behavior.
Psychological scientists have been studying attraction, love, and romantic relationships for decades, but online matching and speed dating have given researchers unprecedented opportunity to explore who’s attracted to whom and why.
For millions of years, humans have been selecting mates using the wealth of information gleaned in face-to-face interactions — not just appearance, but characteristics such as tone of voice, body language, and scent, as well as immediate feedback to their own communications.
Does mate selection differ when those looking are presented with an almost overwhelming number of potential partners, but limited to a few photos, statistics, and an introductory paragraph about each one? What information do online daters focus on?
Is it all about the photo? Or are words the key to someone’s heart (or at least their Match.com inbox)?
In one survey of Australian online daters, 85% said they would not contact someone without a posted photo, so physical appearance is indeed important (Fiore et al., 2008).
A forthcoming study conducted by Günter Hitsch, Ali Hortaçsu (both at University of Chicago), and Dan Ariely (Duke University) confirmed existing evolutional theory, finding that in a sample of 22,000 online daters women weigh income more than physical attributes, including facial attractiveness, height and body mass index, when deciding who to contact (Hitsch et al., 2009).
Interestingly, these differences persist even when reproduction is no longer a factor. In a study that looked at online daters across the lifespan, even older men “sought physical attractiveness and offered status-related information more than women” and women continued to be the more selective gender (Sears-Roberts Alterovitz & Mendelsohn, 2009).
In a nine-month study of participants on a dating site in 2008 and 2009, Andrew Fiore, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues examined stated preferences and actual messaging behavior (Fiore et al., 2010).
In general, women really are pickier than men — listing smaller ranges in their preferences for age and ethnicity.
Women also initiate and reply to contact less than men. They were contacted much more than men and, hence, generally had their choice of who to reply to
But, just as in the face-to-face dating scene, respect is important — users who respected others’ listed preferences for a potential partner were more likely to get a response.
In light of these findings, the researchers presented some advice to potential online daters: “Choose wisely and, if possible, be female” (Fiore et al., 2010).
This study also leads to some intriguing design ideas for online dating sites’ automatic matching systems, which present users with sets of likely partners.
A 2008 study in which participants rated actual online profiles confirmed this, but also explored the criteria that made certain photos attractive (Fiore et al., 2008).
Men were considered more attractive when they looked genuine, extraverted, and feminine, but not overly warm or kind. (Although feminine male photos were seen as attractive, whole male profiles were rated more attractive when they seemed more masculine, a perplexing result worthy of more study.)
Women were deemed more attractive when they looked feminine, high in self-esteem, and not selfish. This study also found that the narrative self-descriptive sections of the profiles played a key role in attractiveness, but the fixed choice sections of the profiles (where users have to pick from a specific set of descriptors, i.e., “Have children now,” “Want children someday,”
“Don’t want children,” smoker/non-smoker, etc.) only minimally affected attractiveness ratings. However, these fixed choice descriptors allow users to triage by easily weeding out those who don’t meet their dealbreaker criteria for a partner (Fiore et al., 2008).
Researchers believe that users make up for the lack of information in online profiles by filling in the blanks with guesses based on small pieces of information.
Some theorize that online daters may be wearing rose colored glasses when looking at potential dates — filling in the information gaps with positive qualities in a potential partner (Gibbs et al., 2006).
In one study, knowing more information about a potential date generally led to liking them less, possibly because it called out inconsistencies and reduced opportunities to fill in the blanks with positive inferences. But, with a particularly compatible partner, more information led to more liking.
For online daters, this means that a very detailed profile might attract fewer, but more compatible suitors (Norton et al., 2007).
Research has also revealed gender differences in both preference and messaging behavior on online dating sites. In particular, women and men differ in the relative importance they assign to various attributes of potential partners.
More popular users are contacted more and, therefore, are less likely to respond to any one user.
Taking this into account, dating sites may want to steer users toward slightly less popular potential dates who are more likely to respond, “a trade-off many users may willingly accept”
G.I.T.C
