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Women's hunch

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Hunch, intuition, gut-feeling, voice whispering in your ears—whatever you may call it, I have experienced, repeatedly, many instances when my first intuition proved to be right.
In this interesting study conducted by Psychologist and Villanova University Associate Professor Rebecca J. Brand, women could intuitively evaluate men’s physical attractiveness from their written online profiles. Without photos, they were asked to evaluate men’s attractiveness from their writing. The result—the women actually didn’t need photos to to discern which ones are attractive.
This Huffington Post article does not include the details of how these women evaluated men’s attractiveness and how much it correlated with the actual attractiveness of the photos. The interpretation is that women are generally attracted to confident men, and the confidence level is reflected in men’s writing. And because our looks/attractiveness impact our confidence level, the more confident you are, the likely that you are attractive.
I find it fascinating that even in such short online profiles, such deeply personal traits can be analyzed. More interesting question would be whether this would apply if done among men. I don’t think for women, being attractive necessarily translates to confidence. In fact, a lot of attractive women I know are insecure. Also, I am not sure if men will be able to pick up on these subtle cues. It would be an interesting study.

Love, Lies and What They Learned

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Some interesting but not surprising findings from a study of more than one million online dating profiles, conducted by Gerald A. Mendelsohn, a professor in the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley.
1. 80% of people misrepresent their height and weight on their online dating profile. Women on average report that they are 8.5 pounds thinner (that’s a lot!), and men 2 pounds.
Some interesting findings on liars:
“Liars tend to use fewer first-person pronouns. Professor Toma said this is an indication of psychological distancing: “You’re feeling guilty or anxious or nervous.” Liars use more negative words like “not” and “never,” yet another way of putting up a buffer. Liars use fewer negative emotion words like “sad” and “upset,” and they write shorter online personal essays. (It’s easier not to get caught if you say less.”
Of course, you can’t really extract or judge an individual profile based on such collective studies, so it’s somewhat useless in my opinion to try to use this as a guideline.
2. People still date others who are similar to the-particularly in race.
This is somewhat obvious to me.
3. The scholars found that women have a stronger preference than men do for income over physical attributes.
Duh! We didn’t need to analyze gazillion profiles to figure this one out.
Conclusion: Online dating helps people reduce transaction cost and allows them to broaden their network. So one might expect more diversity or at least somewhat different behaviors exhibited by users when choosing a date. However, in my opinion, the fact that the user can search and browse for profile information with all kinds of information, in effect, exacerbates homophily. In the real world, whether it be at a party or a blind date set up by friends, conversations take place before one learns if a potential date smokes or makes $150K plus. She can gather more data points that can potentially open her up having follow-up meetings with the person, even though, let’s say, he is not a particular race that she is used to dating. However, in online dating, we filter and browse first by all kinds of attributes that we think are important and feel comfortable with.
I’m not claiming one is better than the other. The former can cause a lot of wasted time, but the latter can cause a lot of missed opportunities. Perhaps a balanced approach of giving enough information about the date through profiles, but not too much information that gives a reason to rule him/her out immediately would be a good compromise.

Fruitless search on online dating?

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In this interesting research conducted by Frost, Chance, Norton, and Ariely (Duke University and Harvard Business School), inefficiencies of current dating platforms are revealed in simple numbers: On average, online daters spend 7 times as many hours screening profiles and emailing potential partners than in actual face-to-face discussions.

Spending 11-12 hours a week to search and email vs. less than 2 hours to actually interact? That’s not only hard to believe but really, quite sad in my opinion. Needless to say, the average satisfaction level for online dating lagged behind offline dates significantly (on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10=Very satsified, online dating averaged 5.5 vs. 7.0 for offline).
I agree that part of this comes from the fact that people don’t have time to search/email potential dates. More importantly, however, current online dating model does not provide a good way for people to evaluate one another in a meaningful way. In fact, most important criteria that respondents considered when evaluating partners were “experiential” criteria that could not be judged through standard online profiles. When asked about important criteria in a mate, people often cited factors such as “person who can understand me”, “maturity”, “willingness to compromise”. This reminded me of an interview ex-CEO of eharmony, Gregory Waldorf, gave on Huffington Post. In answering the question ““What are the universal qualities” that people across different countries and cultures look for in a mate?” He said,
“You hear some version of the following statement [from men]: “I want to be appreciated for whom I am and be with a woman who’s not going to try to change me.” That’s a really common statement for guys. Women universally, in all countries we go to, are looking for men who are dependable, reliable, and good communicators—someone who tells the truth.”
How are you going to find that out from online profiles! No way. This is why I think the current focus on matching algorithm among online dating sites is somewhat pointless. Filtering out matches for users is necessary, but only up to a point. After that, the focus should be all about “How do we help the users learn about their potential dates more deeply but faster?”
As we design Coffee Meets Bagel, this is the ultimate question we keep in mind. We don’t think the answer to delivering a valuable online dating product to users is about having more users, more choices, or more ways to contact a person. We don’t believe that dating boils down to this kind of numbers game (contradictory to what a lot of industry analysts or venture capitalists believe).
Til the day online dating doesn’t require fruitless search!

In Romance, Too Many Choices May Hurt

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Recent studies found out if the brain is faced with abundant choice, it may make decisions based on what it can evaluate most quickly.
Does this apply for love?
According to a recent study conducted over speed dates, at smaller events (with less than 24 participants), participants were much more likely to make decisions based on deeper attributes, such as education, job, smoking habits. At bigger speed dating events, both male and female choosers were more likely to decide based on attributes that could be judged quickly, such as their dates’ height, and whether they were underweight, normal weight, or overweight.
Does this explain why city dwellers seem much more superficial?