Do Social Experiments Help With Love Connections?

A recent article in The New York Times shed light on a particular problem that’s been rearing its ugly head lately: companies are conducting secret experiments with users of social media and online dating sites. Facebook recently revealed that it manipulated the emotional content of news feeds of 700,000 people to see if emotions were contagious. In addition, OkCupid recently shared the results of its own three secret studies of users.

In one test, OkCupid obscured profile pictures so that people could communicate, but they couldn’t see who they were communicating with. The dating site found that members had more meaningful conversations, exchanged more contact details, and responded to first messages more often. When pictures were revealed, many conversations stopped.

In another test, OkCupid hid profile text to see how it affected personality ratings. In general, more attractive users were regarded as more personable – in other words, users were equating looks with personality – even though there wasn’t much information to go on.

The third experiment was the cause of the most controversy, where the site lied to a portion of users, telling them that matches who were (according to OkCupid algorithms) 90% compatible were actually only 30%, and matches with very little compatibility were told they had high compatibility. The end result? Communication went up when people thought they were being matched with someone very compatible, because OkCupid gave them that impression of compatibility, even if it wasn’t the truth.

While it’s interesting to note that people can be swayed by looks and influenced by what a dating site tells them might work, is it really going to improve the overall experience of online dating? In other words, we might track people’s behavior to understand it a little better, but deceiving people to see how they behave is a slippery slope, and doesn’t really improve the current dating experience on OkCupid (or any site). As the study noted, as soon as the pictures were revealed, people went back to their old patterns of behavior.

Facebook and OkCupid aren’t the only sites studying user behavior, and probably aren’t the only sites conducting experiments on users. But before we continue down this path, it’s important to ask: who are these studies really benefitting? Are they helping us to become more open-minded daters? So far, not really.

The study succeeded in making online daters even more cynical about online dating. How do they know if what OkCupid is telling them about compatibility or ratings is true? It makes the already confusing world of dating a little less friendly and upfront. Dating needs more honesty, not less.