Is Online Dating Worth It?
Another possible explanation is that men prefer women who are less educated than they are as suggested by Hitsch et al. . When examining works on the ISM (Fletcher et al., 1999; Campbell et al., 2001) the user attributes we examined can be viewed as representing the ISM characteristics (warmth-trustworthiness, vitality-attractiveness, and status-resources) in a variety of ways. It would stand to reason that those who have the same education, for example, may also share status . Similarly, two people of the same religion could be seen as aligned on their trustworthiness virtue. Therefore, the selection of an individual could be seen as a selection aligned with ISM attributes.
On average, users rate women as more attractive than men during their 20s, but in their early 30s, this reverses. Due to the inherently digital nature of online dating sites and apps, they provide significant amounts of hard data about how people behave on them. This allowed researchers to learn a great deal about the dynamics of online dating. While Tinder (i.e., a popular mobile dating app) has received quite some research attention, its effects on users’ well-being have rarely been addressed.
In this work, we focus our investigation on features of a user’s mobile dating app profile and ask which are most effective in drawing a match between two people. Using the limited information provided to users when making a selection we try to estimate the likelihood of a pair choosing to exchange contact information and engage in a conversation outside the digital world. If you’ve ever heard stories from your friends about their bad dates, you might reasonably approach dating apps with caution. But just as online dating can foster some comically bad experiences, there are plenty of benefits as well. Many of us know couples who seem so perfectly matched that it’s almost impossible to believe they met on opposite sides of a screen.
Although male users spend less time per profile, they engage with more profiles, leading to similar amounts of total time spent reviewing potential matches as female users do. To estimate preference and likelihood of effective matching we excluded any users who, for a particular query, did not provide the specific data (e.g., only those who provided their religion were included in queries related to religion). We did not impute missing data given that this would require accessing individual user information rather than aggregated data, which we did not have access to.
Thirdly, the lists of potential partners presented to users are generated by the recommendation algorithm of the website, not the result of users’ own search, and therefore could not reflect users’ preference well. Ranking effects caused by recommendation algorithms in online environments have been shown to influence the music people select and the politicians people favor . Fourthly we study the users’ attribute preference without considering the potential impact of other attributes. In real life, sending a message to another user is usually not affected by a single attribute. The additional attributes included in users’ profiles—their avatar, place of residence, and marital status—could also influence whether a message was sent or not, which means that the users’ preference for an attribute can be an illusion and may be based on other considerations. Fifthly, there are significant differences between Chinese and western cultures, and the website is only for heterosexual users, thus the conclusions of this paper may not be applicable to western society or homosexual people .
The market growth in 2020 is likely to increase compared to market growth in 2019. Accordingly, an extension of this work could go beyond the realms of dating and onto studies of preferences. One could look at online mobile apps that match users for purposes of work, collaboration, or other social interactions. We might learn that a choice of, for example, hiring an employee, takes equal time whether elaborate thinking goes into it or whether it is done in fractions of a second. This might suggest that the notion of homophily and tendency for presence of similar characteristics are at the heart of more of our decisions. We concluded that a match is effective when the two people in the conversations exchanged contact information.