Contributed by: ElyseRomano on Friday, March 16 2012 @ 08:43 am
Last modified on
There are a few questions that have stumped great thinkers forever:
To be or not to be?
What is the meaning of life?
What's more important: your profile or your picture?
I don't have an answer for the first two, but a small study run by AnswerLab in San Francisco may have an answer for the third. The study asked 39 patrons of a coffee shop to look at dating profiles from Match.com and eHarmony.com on a laptop. The 18 women and 21 men who participated all identified as interested in dating someone of the opposite sex.
As the participants viewed the profiles, the researcher used the Tobii X1 Light Eye Tracker to collected dating about where the participants' eyes focused on the computer screen. The tracker works by shining an infrared light at the eye and creating a reflection that is then recorded by a camera. After collecting the recordings, the program evaluates the physical structure of the eye (the angle between the cornea and pupil) to calculate the angle of the gaze. Added together, the angle of the gaze and the distance between the eyes and the screen make for an accurate method of tracking the eye's movements.
Though most people are not aware of it, the eye is moving at all times in order to take in everything with the maximum amount of detail. The eye stops moving only briefly, called a "fixation," to focus on each different element that catches your attention. Thanks to the fixations, eye tracking systems can determine exactly what we look at and for how long - like what parts of an online dating profile attract the most attention from curious singles.
The AnswerLab study found that women spent an average of 84 seconds evaluating a profile to determine if it was a match, while men spent an average of 58 seconds. Men spent the majority of their time assessing a user's photo - 65% more than women, to be exact. Men also spent 50% less time analyzing the profile overall.
The sample size was small for the study, but it may offer a little guidance when it comes to creating a profile. Know your target audience: if you're interested in men, spend more time picking the perfect photo, and if you're interested in women, devote your time and attention to crafting an original and (literally) eye-catching profile.