My Dating Site Thinks I'm a Loser

Comment on Jill's blog,

This study was carried out by Shailendra Rao, Tom Hurlbutt, Clifford Nass and Nundu JanakiRam from Stanford university. In this study, they wanted to see if the presence of one's own personal photo and/or the presentation intervals between recommendations on a dating site would affect the user's behavior. They began by taking 56 participants and having them set up a profile on MetaMatch, a dating website created by the researchers. The users were then required to answer questions that would be used to find their matches.

Regardless of how the participants answered the question, they were given a set of four poor matches. Half of the participants were made to answer all the questions before seeing their matches and the others saw a set of four matches after every ten questions. Of the people that received several sets of matches, some of them had their own photo present on the page when they answered the next set of questions and some did not.

The researchers found that people were much more inclined to change the way they answered the questions when they received undesirable matches and their photo was not present on the screen. I guess if you picture is there, you feel like you are lying to yourself. Of course, if you don't answer the questions truthfully, you are. They also found that the participants who received several sets of bad matches became much more frustrated than those who only received one set.

I think that this could definitely be used to find ways of improving, not just dating recommendations but different types of recommendations on other websites. However, I think that dating sites are just much more difficult just because of how personal they are. Recommendations for books are great because if I buy the book and don't like it, that's fine. On a dating site though, there is much more at stake emotionally.