Studies

Our phones are with us all the time, and they can do amazing things. Instagram has allowed us to be amateur photographers, taking pictures of our food, our neighborhoods – and yes, ourselves.

Selfies have become not only popular, but somewhat of a cultural pastime, particularly for teens and twenty-somethings. The power of the camera phone and the fascination with social media platforms that are visually-based, like Instagram, have compelled people to take more photos, documenting every part of their lives. At the center of this compulsion is selfies.

While selfies are meant to be a fun, harmless way of showing your followers and friends where you are and what you are up to, for some people, they have become a bit of an obsession. When you post selfies all the time, what is the impact on your real-life relationships? Does the act of taking a selfie take you out of the moment, preventing you from truly enjoying wherever you are and whoever you’re with?

A UK study from University of Birmingham came out last year that shows selfies do negatively impact relationships. While you might think posting a steady stream of selfies brings your friends and loved one closer to you, giving them access to you moment-by-moment, it actually makes them feel more distant.

As part of the three-year study, researchers asked participants how they felt when they saw different people in their circle - like a close friend, a partner, or just an acquaintance - posting selfies. They then asked them to report on the quality of their relationship with the person posting selfies. They found that participants felt less supported by and less intimate with people who posted more frequent selfies, regardless of their relationship with the person – even their partners/ spouses.

In other words, posting streams of selfies can actually distance you from those you love rather than bring you together.

The good news is you can take a different approach with much better results. It seems that people who are close to you IRL may not appreciate you sharing every little pose and moment with your followers – many of whom might be work colleagues or acquaintances. People close to you want to feel special.

Instead of posting everything you think might be interesting, cute or funny, consider your audience. Maybe instead you can text your partner or best friend the selfie, instead of posting it publicly over social media. Be more choosy with what you share – and consider the impact it might have on your work and personal relationships.

Bottom line: selfies are part of our culture, but they don’t have to tell your life story.

Do you approve of sex on a first date, or would you avoid it at all costs? People typically fall into very distinctive camps in this heated debate – yes or never. Maybe you use Tinder every night, swiping right until you get lucky, or perhaps you completely reject the idea of first date sex because you want to maintain a certain level of interest from the object of your affection by playing coy.

If you’d rather wait to have sex, you’re in agreement with a majority of Americans. According to a recent study by website Dating Advice, 66% of Americans do not approve of having sex on the first date – two out of every three people.

This seems counter-intuitive to our culture. After all, dating apps like Tinder – an efficient and speedy app that connects people quickly, often for hooking up – are becoming the new norm. We are inundated with sexy images in the media, and our views as a culture have become increasingly liberal. There isn’t the stigma that used to be associated with premarital sex. So why does this attitude towards first date sex remain?

According to Gary Lewandowski Jr., the chair of psychology at Monmouth University and co-creator of ScienceofRelationships.com, most Americans say they don't approve of first date sex but, "it may not indicate how much first date sex [they] are having themselves." He adds that the views respondents express "reflect conformity to expectations that society has, rather than a reflection of how they actually feel." In other words, they think they are supposed to disapprove of it, so they do.

He may be right, but attitudes vary among the sexes. There was a huge distinction between men and women in their responses, with 82% of women agreeing that they wouldn’t have first date sex while only 48% of men said they wouldn’t.

"Women are the harshest judges of other women's behavior," said Robin Milhausen, an associate professor of human sexuality at the University of Guelph. "Many women wouldn't think it was OK for a woman to have sex on the first date, thinking this would be 'slutty behavior'. Women also are aware of the double-standard, recognizing they could be judged negatively if they had sex on the first date, making first date sex an unwise behavior for them." Men however, have more supportive attitudes about casual sex, so they are more likely to say they would have it.

1,080 people over the course of three weeks were surveyed for the study.

The times, they are a-changin’. In fact, they’re more than changing. They’re completely transforming. Evolving, even.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the majority of American adults are now single. This is the first time single adults have outnumbered married adults since 1976, when the BLS started keeping track in the first place.

Back in August, there were 124.6 million single Americans – a number that counts for 50.2% of the 16-and-over US population. 0.2% may not seem like a big number, but it's statistically relevant and, more importantly, it's socially relevant.

Eric Klinenberg, an NYU sociology professor who researches marriage trends, told the New York Post he believes that margin will remain the same for the foreseeable future, but that change is still afoot. “I don’t expect the proportion of singles to go much higher, but it could go up a bit more,” he said. “Marriage rates are going down all over the developed world as people experiment with new ways to organize their lives and their relationships.”

That, in turn, could have social, political, and economic ripple effects. On the whole, single Americans prefer to rent housing rather than purchase it. They're also less likely to have children. Trends like these, and others in a similar vein, mean major changes in spending are probably on the way. A third of young adults still live with their parents, and even those who don't are concerned they can't afford to participate in marriage and other aspects of the American dream like generations before. Maybe the dream itself will change.

Of course, it's important to note that "single" in this context simply means "not married." Plenty of folks in that 16-and-over category are probably casually coupled up or settled into serious, long-term partnerships. “Just because people are not getting married doesn’t mean they’re not partnering and cohabitating,” said Karen Guzzo, a sociology professor at Bowling Green State University, to the Post.

And it seems that even though marriage rates have plummeted, plenty of young people still hope to get hitched. According to Gallup survey data, only 9% of Americans in the 18 to 34 age range say they both have never been married and do not ever want to marry. 54% of Americans are currently married and 21% of those who have never been married say they want to tie the knot someday.

In the meantime, those 21% can join the 9% in celebrating National Unmarried and Single Americans Week – because yes, that's a real thing.

Ever wanted to get inside the minds of thousands of daters to see what makes everyone tick? Maybe that seems cool, or maybe you’d rather sit in a dentist’s chair for five hours, but either way – it does make you curious.

So it’s no surprise that OkCupid Co-Founder Christian Rudder has decided to harness the power of OkCupid’s user data and create a book that piques our curiosity. After all, we all watched with fascination as the dating site’s blog OkTrends revealed its latest research, informing us of what types of people we are attracted to, we’re doing wrong in our online dating profiles, or how to effectively message other users. Rudder found interesting trends in the details, helping us ask questions we didn’t even know to ask. For instance, why does the angle of the camera matter in a photo, or how you smile? Why is it preferable to write a less descriptive profile? Why is it more attractive to have a guitar in your hand than a tennis racket, or possess an unusually-shaped nose than to be considered average-looking? Or the million-dollar question: what do people lie about the most when they are online dating?

OkCupid has given us the sometimes surprising preferences of online daters, based on all of the data they mine from their thousands of users. Because of the site’s format of creative questions and answers, it’s allowed them to dig deeper than most.

OkTrends has been on hiatus since 2011, when Rudder started taking the information to compile it into a book, rather than just posting the information for free on their website. Rudder’s new book is called Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), which comes out on Sept. 9 and examines interactions for insights into whom and how we date.

For one of Dataclysm’s studies, Rudder analyzed how men and women approach attraction. It turns out that as women get older, they like older men. Men, on the other hand, consistently prefer younger and younger women. Men will message women close to their own age, but only up to a point. For example, men in their mid-40s rarely talk to women older than 30. “We have a lot of serial daters on the site—men who just keep dating women 10 years younger than they are,” Rudder told Business Week in a recent interview. “Eventually their tactics start to fail, and the young ladies they’re messaging begin rejecting them. The result is a lot of 40-year-old men and women who find it hard to get a date.”

OkCupid isn’t worried about user backlash for mining their personal data. Rudder recently wrote a post to address this issue, pointing out that all websites experiment on users, admitting that OkCupid once tested its matchmaking algorithm by telling users who were not suited for each other that they were a near-perfect match. “We got maybe five complaints,” Rudder told Business Week.

Since OkCupid users don’t pay for the site or its advice, does Rudder have an audience willing to buy his book? We’ll have to wait and see.

Check out our review of OkCupid for more information on this popular dating site.

Do people tend to speak up more about issues facing our society because of social media? Does everyone’s voice get heard? If you were to look at any Facebook feed, you’d probably say it’s a great tool for discussing issues and stating opinions. It’s given many people a voice, and the ability to craft a thought and publicize it.

But a recent study by Pew Research points to something else – namely, that people have quite the opposite reaction when it comes to social media: they are afraid to share their views. There is a tendency of people not to speak up about policy issues in public—or among their family, friends, and work colleagues—when they believe their own point of view is not widely shared. This tendency is called the “spiral of silence.”

Social media has only deepened this tendency, at least as Pew researched human behavior pre-Internet compared to what is taking place now. Facebook and Twitter especially seem to advocate for those who hold minority opinions to use their platforms to voice them, but many users haven’t.

Pew conducted a survey of 1,801 adults, focusing on one important public issue that most Americans had heard about: the Edward Snowden revelation about government surveillance of Americans’ phone and email records. Pew says they chose this issue because Americans were divided about the issue - whether Snowden’s leaks to the media were justified or whether the surveillance policy itself was a good or bad idea.

The research firm surveyed people’s opinions about the leaks, their willingness to talk about the revelations in either in-person or online settings, and their perceptions of the views of other people, both online and offline.

It turns out, people were less willing to discuss the Snowden-NSA story over social media than they were in person, with 86% willing to discuss in person versus only 42% of Facebook and Twitter users who were willing to post about it on those platforms. In addition, in both personal and online settings, people were more willing to share their views if they thought their audience agreed with them. For example, those who felt their co-workers agreed with them were about three times more likely to say they’d join a workplace conversation about the Snowden situation.

It is similar with Facebook users – those who thought their friends would agree with them were also more likely to post their opinion about the issue, but those who weren’t sure were less likely. Facebook and Twitter users were also less likely to share their opinions in person with friends, say over dinner, if they felt that their Facebook friends didn’t agree with them.

Many people might decide that sharing political viewpoints over Facebook or Twitter might alienate friends or colleagues. This is also a reason why people refrain from sharing information that is too personal. Regardless, the Pew study shows that Americans may be a lot less willing than we assumed to share their true feelings over social media.

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.