OkCupid Says #SorryNotSorry For Experimenting On Users

Facebook caused a huge outcry back in June when it revealed it had manipulated the news feeds of over half a million users as part of a psychological study to examine how emotions spread on social media.

The response was intense (to say the least), but Facebook is far from the only Internet company to treat its users like lab rats. OkCupid fessed up to conducting studies on its members via a blog entry posted on July 28. And they weren't exactly apologetic about it.

“We noticed recently that people didn’t like it when Facebook 'experimented' with their news feed,” the entry reads. “Even the FTC is getting involved. But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.”

Admittedly, they have a point. No matter how popular or successful OkCupid is, there are always improvements to be made and the only way to discover those improvements is to conduct experiments. Or, in the site’s own words, “OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing. Neither does any other website. It’s not like people have been building these things for very long, or you can go look up a blueprint or something. Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better. Experiments are how you sort all this out.”

In this case, the experiment told users they were more compatible than they really were to test the power of suggestion. Typically, among users who were given a 30% compatibility rating by OkCupid, a single message from one to another turned into a conversation just 10% of the time. But, if OkCupid told users with low compatibility that their compatibility score was 90%, the odds of having a conversation jumped to 17%.

The experiment found the same results in the opposite direction. When users with 90% compatibility were told their score was only 30%, the likelihood of a conversation dropped from 20% to 16%. OkCupid isn’t at all surprised that users take the compatibility rating so seriously – “after all,” notes the blog post, “that’s what the site teaches you to do.”

Then OkCupid took a step further. The question became “Does the displayed match percentage cause more than just that first message – does the mere suggestion cause people to actually like each other?”

As far as this data goes, the answer is yes. When OkCupid tells people they’re a good match, they act as if they are, even if they should be wrong for each other - which means that at the end of the day, the myth of compatibility may be just as powerful as the truth.