I had no idea Getty Images had a “socially awkward” set of stock photos.
[via Reddit] “Internet dating,” said one rather cynical programmer with whom I am acquainted, “is a web of lies and obesity.”
And to a certain extent, he’s right. According to a recent article in Scientific American titled The Truth About Online Dating, lies abound, from little white lies such as overreporting your height by an inch or underreporting your weight by a few pounds to using a picture of someone else in your profile (people I know have been lied to in both these ways).
One study cited in the article says that women underreport their weight by an average of 5 pounds in their online dating profiles in their 20s, but women in their 40s are pushing the believability envelope: on average, they shave 19 pounds off their profile.
Just as real-world daters have developed mate-attracting tactics — the Wonderbra, expensive clothes, driving a fancy car, “Axe” body spray — online daters have done the same. They realize, whether they know anything about databases, that combing through an online dating site is essentially the repeated execution of SQL along the lines of:
SELECT * FROM people WHERE AGE [ is between 24 and 35 ] AND WEIGHT [ is somewhere in the range of the female doctors from "Grey's Anatomy" ] AND interests INCLUDE....
Some daters specifically lie when entering data used for search criteria (such as age and weight) and tell the truth in the “tell us a little bit about yourself” section. They even admit the reason for the deception: if they didn’t lie about their attributes, they’d never end up in anyone’s search results.
Of course a little deception is to be expected — it’s part of any relationship, whether it started in “real life” or online. After all, little white lies keep society from seizing up completely:
Comic from Overcompensating for September 29, 2004. Click the comic to see it on its original page.
There’s also the matter that people generally have two notions of themselves — an “ideal self” and a “real self”, who’s just a temporary stop on the way to the ideal, if they could only get the time/money/whatever to bridge that gap.
The article calls into question the effectiveness of “scientific” personality tests and profiling quizzes. The author, who has 30 years of test research and 15 years of test design under his belt, expresses doubt that any of these tests are more effective at matching you with your soul mate than doing so “the old-fashioned way. He writes that for all their claims to being scientific, none of their tests have been subject to any serious peer review in a journal.
Also covered in the article are the discrepancy between the high levels of reported user satisfaction in dating sites’ advertising versus the much lower levels reported in surveys, the Pew Internet and American Life study in which 66% of internet users feel that internet dating is a dangerous activity and the difference between reported membership and actual paying members.
Still, as more aspects of our lives go online, internet dating is expected to remain a growing phenomenon. Any of you who plan to develop a dating site — or even social software — should take a look at the article; there are some interesting insights that you’ll have to factor into your designs.