Online dating doesn’t work. But this has implications even if you’re not on eharmony.com. The sexily-titled “People Are Experience Goods: Improving Online Dating With Virtual Dates,” published late last year in the Journal of Interactive Marketing, provides some clues. We can’t just match people with each other the way we’d match people with static products, the way Amazon.com’s recommendation service does. (I wrote a feature a while back on recommendation technology.)
What can be searched for in profiles–eye color, income, weight–aren’t at all related to the actual experience of dating someone. On paper or online, Brad Pitt is perfect. But there’s a sizable gap “between the kinds of information people both want and need to determine whether someone is a good romantic match and the kind of information available on online dating profiles.” Sites like eHarmony.com that test and match people on “29 dimensions of compatibility” can’t reliably transfer over to real life. On-the-fly interactions are crucial for interpreting personality and sense of humor; things like loyalty can only be gauged over time. As study co-author Zoe Chance told me, “Dating is much more complicated because our personalities change depending on whom we’re with.”
Another study (“‘Shopping’ for a Mate: Expected versus Experienced Preferences in Online Mate Choice,” available here) examines the effect of choice overload and its consequences on dating behaviors. Yes, there is such a thing as having too many options–especially since, as stated above, even though you may want a partner with blue eyes, whether he or she has blue eyes has no bearing on your actual interactions together. And then there’s the whole value inherent in stepping outside of your comfort zone. As I’m reminded in the excellent book The Black Swan, one of the problems with prediction is that we don’t know what we don’t know. We’re notoriously bad at predicting what will make us happy, despite a tendency to cling to certain ideas about what kind of profession, brand of jeans, or tattoos our ideal partner would have.
So for people who mistakenly think that they’re saving time by going online to find things like dating partners or new careers, just remember that there’s no shortcut to going out on an actual date.
Filed under: Behavior | Leave a Comment
Tags: dating, prediction, psychology, relationships
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Photo credit: Fran Lebowitz.I like to write about behavior, culture, and technology.
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