Contributed by: ElyseRomano on Tuesday, August 12 2014 @ 07:15 am
Last modified on
The Internet has been afire recently with the news that both Facebook and OkCupid have experimented on their users. Both companies have apologized or pseudo-apologized for their actions, while being careful to note that such online experimentation isn’t uncommon.
OkCupid took it one step further in their non-apology, candidly declaring that “if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site” and revealing two more experiments they’ve conducted on users.
The first was born out of OkCupid’s short-lived blind date app. To celebrate the app’s release, OkCupid removed all the photos from the site on launch day. During those seven photo-less hours, OkCupid noticed some interesting things:
In short, OkCupid functioned better without pictures. When the photos were restored, the conversations that had started blind melted away. “The goodness was gone,” notes the blog post, “in fact worse than gone. It was like we’d turned on the bright lights at the bar at midnight.” The blind date app revealed a similar phenomenon. When users got to the date, they had a good time more or less regardless of how physically attractive their partner was. “Basically,” the post reads, “people are exactly as shallow as their technology allows them to be.”
In a related experiment, OkCupid decided to test its original rating system that allowed users to judge each other on two separate scales: Personality and Looks. “Our thinking was that a person might not be classically gorgeous or handsome but could still be cool,” the blog explains, “and we wanted to recognize that, which just goes to show that when OkCupid started out, the only thing with more bugs than our HTML was our understanding of human nature.”
After gathering the data, OkCupid found that “looks” and “personality” were essentially the same thing to users. They ran a second, direct experiment to confirm their hunch that people just look and pictures and ignore profiles. A small sample of users were shown profiles that did not contain text, resulting in two sets of scores for each profile: one score for the picture and text together, and one for the picture alone.
The results were predictably disheartening: text is less than 10% of what people think of you. The blog says it best: “your picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth…almost nothing.” Ouch.