OkCupid

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.

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:

• Users responded to first messages 44% more often
• Conversations were deeper
• Contact info was exchanged more quickly

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.

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.

If you’ve been anywhere near a news source lately, you probably heard about Facebook’s big news feed experiment. The social network manipulated the news feeds of hundreds of thousands of users to see if the emotion they absorbed through reading content on their news feeds impacted the emotion they later displayed in their own posts. People were, unsurprisingly, not too psyched at the revelation that Facebook had toyed with their emotions.

Shortly afterwards OkCupid revealed that it, too, has experimented on users, and the furor started again. In their most recent experiment, OkCupid told users — falsely — that they’re compatible in order to spark more conversations. As a result, OkCupid found that perceived compatibility is just as effective as real compatibility.

Reactions to both experiments have been mixed. Some have said that OkCupid’s testing is less controversial than Facebook’s. Others have called the OkCupid experiment worse than Facebook’s. What everyone seems to agree on is that they’re not quite sure if they should be upset or not. On one hand, lying to customers seems like an obvious faux-pas. But on the other hand, isn’t that just how the Internet works?

As Josh Constine noted in a TechCrunch post, by using services like Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and yes, Facebook, we agree to be part of experiments that change the way we experience the sites. The experiments are called A/B tests, and companies use them to figure how to encourage users to visit a site longer or click more things. This is nothing new.

However, there may be some room for concern. In academia, research involving human subjects is severely limited and carefully monitored by review boards to ensure that it is not deceptive and harm is minimized. Where companies are concerned, there’s no such thing as a review board. It’s up to the companies themselves to abide by the core principles of ethical research.

So how should you feel about Facebook’s and OkCupid’s experiments?

Any way you want. Unlike those two companies, I’m not here to manipulate into doing or feeling anything.

But if asked to take a stand, I’d have to put myself pro-OkCupid and less-than-convinced about Facebook. Facebook deliberately tried to change users’ emotions for the worse by manipulating content in their feeds, all without their consent. It’s hard to get behind that, no matter how much you enjoy psychological studies. For OkCupid, I’m willing to give a pass. At the end of the day, those kinds of experiments are just OkCupid doing its job. Without testing, OkCupid would never improve its ability to match users – and that’s the whole reason we’re there in the first place.

Judgment and dating go hand in hand. Even before online dating became so popular, singles would assess their dates based on a few traits they deemed important – like sense of humor, work ethic, kindness, or how hot they looked in a pair of jeans - to see whether or not they were worth a second date. But at least you could go on a first date knowing essentially nothing, hoping for the best. You had to deal with the element of surprise before you were allowed to judge.

Now, all of the mystery has been removed from dating. Dating websites like OkCupid allow you not only to see the profiles of potential dates and pick them apart, but you can also see ratings given by other people (that is, if you pay $10 for the premium service). If one of your matches gets two stars out of five, you’d be less likely to ask him/ her out. After all, aren’t we influenced by the opinions of others?

The more important question is: should we be so influenced, especially when it comes to meeting someone for the first time?

Dating apps like Lulu are focused solely on reviews. The app was intended to be a place where women could get feedback about potential dates before they decided to go out with them, kind of a girlfriend safety mechanism. But it is actually more like a Yelp for dating – where women rate guys according to their looks, how they behaved on a date, sense of humor, and other qualities. So if a guy receives a low score, women who check him out on Lulu would probably avoid dating him.

The problem with this rating system is two-fold. First, the numbers can be skewed. Sure, maybe the guy is a jerk and has twenty women who will agree with that assessment. Then his low rating makes sense, and other women would want to know before going out with him. However, if a guy only has a couple of reviews, and one of them is from a jilted ex, then it brings his overall score down. In fact, what’s to stop any woman from retaliation through Lulu’s rating system?

The second problem with Lulu’s system is that it disqualifies too many potential dates based on factors that might not be important to every woman. For instance, maybe a man’s sense of humor rates low because the women he’s been out with didn’t understand his quirky style. Does that mean you – his next potential date – shouldn’t go out with him? What if his sense of humor is exactly your type?

Rating systems serve a good purpose in dating as far as warning women of potentially bad dates. But if you base whether or not to take a chance on someone solely on a rating system, you are severely limiting your options. Because you never know who the right guy for you is until you actually meet him.

Are you an eHarmony or OkCupid user? Chances are, you wouldn’t join both sites, because they cater to two different types of users. eHarmony attracts daters who are more serious and committed to finding a partner, whereas OkCupid skews a bit younger and takes itself a lot less seriously.

But regardless of which online dating site you choose – wouldn’t you want to understand how to use it most effectively, so you could obtain better results? Would you want to know how other people are using the site, and potentially how they are matched and communicate with you?

Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj “Misiek” Piskorski is the author of the newly released book A Social Strategy: How We Profit From Social Media. In conducting research for his book, he obtained data sets from both OkCupid and eHarmony to determine how different demographics communicate, flirt, and connect over the websites. He set out to see the differences in communication styles between men and women as well as older and younger users.

In the course of writing his book, which is designed for businesses with social media presences, Piskorski studied the online dating habits of millions of users. After personal information was made anonymous so it wouldn’t be compromised, he started his search: specifically, how online daters send messages to each other, how they flirt online, and how they use the sites.

In a recent interview with Fast Company magazine, Piskorski said, “Where eHarmony varies dramatically is communication. People reach out to each other more on eHarmony, and get more responses on there. The people you traditionally would think have the hardest time reaching out to people do very well on eHarmony.”

What does this mean in terms of day to day use of the site? Generally speaking, because each person's pool of matches is smaller on a site like eHarmony where the matches are qualified, they tend to have an easier time reaching out. For timid users, it’s an empowering thing – they will message more on a site like eHarmony than on OkCupid when they know they are competing with thousands of other members.

Another reason for the increased communication on eHarmony is due to the fact that older women and men who are older, more overweight, or shorter than average daters are also more likely to reach out on eHarmony without feeling intimidated. Again, the limited number of matches he feels is a primary reason. Because eHarmony users have fewer choices than okCupid users, they are more likely to reach out, especially women, to people they are matched with.

So does less mean more? Perhaps. OkCupid users tended to gravitate towards specific matching services that offered more bite-sized options, too. For women, it was Quiver, which showed them matches that OkCupid thought would be good based on their likes and communication patterns. For men, it was a service called Quickmatch, where they could look at photos and basic profile information and rate the users according to what they find attractive.

Perhaps a study of dating app communication will be next on Pikorski’s list.