Contributed by: Editor on Saturday, June 28 2008 @ 09:39 am
Last modified on
In online dating, are more matches better? Well, according to PhysOrg.com[*1] this may not be the case. A study done recently showed that:
people tend to anticipate that they’ll feel better about “shopping for a mate” when there is a large number of options. However, in actuality, people feel equally good when faced with few as opposed to many options.
Participants in the study predicted on average that they would be most satisfied with between 20 and 50 matches. What was found, was these same participants in actuality experience similar satisfaction with just 4 matches.
Basically, with too many matches people have information overload and tend to miss attributes that are important to them as them skim through the match search results. In the end the person performing the search tends to feel more frustrated, especially if Mr. or Mrs. Right was not found. When looking at only 4 matches, participants in the study took more time in reviewing the matches and ended up (more than the other group with a large number of matches) in picking someone to they would like to date.
Dating services like Match.com may entice more visitors since they offer them a large selection of matches but in the end, services like eHarmony may be the better choice for singles due to the fact they only offer a select choice of possibly higher quality matches.