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Everbody seems to be doing it!
What?
Looking for love online.
According to recent statistics for those looking for love then ‘everybody seems to be doing it online’. So for those of you looking for a bit of summer romance, then boost your odds of making a match with these new research based insights.
A Video is Worth a Thousand Words
If you have ever chosen a profile picture for an online dating site, you have probably tried to pick a shot that gets across some of your key traits—energetic, friendly, silly, warm. Yet recent research suggests that the people who see your photograph are probably not accurately gauging your personality. A new study finds that a short video can leave a much more accurate first impression.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin put together a speed-dating pool of about 200 men and women. They also took photos of the participants, mimicking those found on online dating sites, and recorded short videos of the same individuals to see what kinds of first impressions people would form in each context. For each scenario, participants rated those they “met” on traits such as attractiveness, humour, intelligence and other qualities that we usually judge within seconds. The researchers presented their findings in January at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology meeting in San Diego.
Ratings from the three groups showed that individuals were more likely to agree on what another person was like if they met face-to-face or saw a video of that person. But when they had only a picture to go by, the raters used more of their own beliefs and schemas to make judgments. When someone describes a static image it usually tells more about the viewer than it tells about the person in the photograph.
The reason we misjudge photos, the researchers say, is that the limited information contained in a photo puts us in an abstract mindset. We then draw on our past experience and expectations to fill in the blanks. A video, on the other hand, contains dynamic details that capture our attention and quickly reveal volumes about a person’s personality—even if the clip is just a few seconds long. Someone’s smile, voice and gestures, for example, provide instant clues about his or her agreeableness, trustworthiness and self-confidence.
Live impressions, of course, are the most powerful. So when you start warming up to a potential date online, it is important to get to that meet-up at a coffee shop or bar so you can get a more authentic sense of the person. Meanwhile clever entrepreneurs are already creating dating apps based on videos, not photos…..
The Problem With Speed Swiping
Ideally, any potential date deserves a fresh look, unaffected by what you thought of the last person you saw. But new research suggests that we may not be giving prospects a fair chance when we switch or swipe from one profile to another on dating apps and Web sites.
In a study described in March in Scientific Reports, female subjects saw men’s faces on a screen for 300 milliseconds—about the length of a very short view on a dating app such as Tinder. After each face, they judged it attractive or not. The researchers found that faces were more likely to be judged attractive when they followed other attractive faces. Two factors caused this pattern: a response bias, in which one presses the same key as last time, and a perceptual effect mostly likely caused by the short interval allowed for processing the faces.
Previous studies have shown contrast effects, in which people in photographs look uglier when viewed next to portraits of attractive strangers. But in the new study, the exposure was so brief that an individual face was not fully processed, and thus it took on qualities of the previous face. Jessica Taubert, one of the lead authors of the paper and a researcher at the University of Sydney, advises online daters: “Be mindful that your brain has limited cortical resources.” In other words, slow down!
In another new paper, in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers asked whether contrast effects occur when judging personality. Participants viewed two dating profiles. When the first person came across as uncaring (“I get bored talking about feelings and stuff”), the second person, who was nice but unattractive, seemed much more appealing. In real profiles, people might not appear as blatantly callous as in this study, but other personality traits could be turnoffs that bias viewers’ later decisions.
So whatever speed swipe app you’re using, it pays to clear your head and try to view each profile as a unique individual—before rushing on to the next one.
To Hide Or Not To Hide
Online dating provides opportunities we do not have in the real world, like scanning 100 potential sweethearts in an hour. But some of these advantages may actually be drawbacks. Anonymous browsing, for instance, allows users to look at people’s profiles without the target knowing they got checked out—which can mean freedom from drawing unwanted messages. Yet it also erases any breadcrumbs that might lead to love. A paper published online in February in Management Science finds that on the whole, this feature backfires.
The researchers selected 100,000 users of a large online dating site and gave half of them the ability to browse anonymously, which usually costs extra. They became less inhibited and more likely to look at people of the same sex or a different race. The researchers thought the disinhibition would translate into more matches….but….women with this ability actually made fewer matches because they did not leave so-called weak signals of interest that might lead the other party to follow up. The simple notification that a particular person perused your profile is often enough to get a conversation started. Anonymous browsing did not affect men’s matches as much, because the men were already uninhibited—they messaged individuals who interested them. Women, however, are less likely in general to make the first move and therefore depend more on sending weak signals to invite flirtation.
Further, what secret scanners lost in quantity they did not gain in quality. The average romantic appeal of their matches, as rated by other users, was no different from those of nonanonymous users.
So wherever you are this summer, and whoever you are with, have a wonderful time!