Studies

If you were a fan of the OkTrends blog – and let’s be real, who wasn’t? – your day is about to get a little better. Though the brilliant blog is no more, its writer, Christian Rudder, has plenty more to say on the subject of the human side of Big Data. He has just released a new book that explores who we are in a world in which we make an increasing amount of data about ourselves available online.

The book is called Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking). Sites like OkCupid collect vast amounts of information on their users in order to provide better service, and in doing so raise some interesting questions. Rudder believes the info isn’t just useful for the websites – he also believes it may change the way we see ourselves.

That being said, he readily admits that data isn’t everything. "Look,” he told NPR's Arun Rath, “there's no way OkCupid, Facebook, Twitter, these sites even added all together can stand in for the entirety of the human condition. People do all kinds of things they don't do online." But it would be silly to let all that data go to waste, wouldn’t it?

Rudder has examined everything from age, to race, to gender, to language, to attraction. His findings are consistently fascinating for both data geeks and non-data geeks alike, such as:

• There is a strong bias against African American users on online dating sites. They are rated lower, receive fewer messages, and are less often replied to than people of other races. Online daters of both genders tend to prefer to date within their own racial or ethnic group.
• Contrary to popular belief, women don’t prefer older men. Until women reach the age of 40, they are more interested in men in their age range. On the other hand, men across the board show a preference for younger women. 20-year-old female users were reliably rated highest by men of all ages.

As fascinating as Rudder’s analysis is, it has its limitations. There are potential hazards to taking consumer data collected for a specific purpose and using it to extract meaning about something else. Data also isn’t necessarily indicative of behavior. In the case of OkCupid’s users, it may measure opinions but not actual actions. Still, Rudder firmly believes collecting this kind of information is worthwhile.

“I definitely think it's good,” he told NPR. “When you put all this stuff together, you're able to look at people in a way that people have never been able to look at people before. ... You have millions and millions of people living their lives through an interface that records what they're doing as they live. ... It's the beginning of, I think, a revolution in how social science and behavioral science are done.”

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.

All of us, at least once, no matter how much we profess to love dating, have wished we could just snap our fingers and magically make the perfect partner appear.

Well…I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that researchers at the University of Iowa believe they may have found the secret to online dating success. The bad news is that no magic is involved, and snapping your fingers probably won’t help.

The key, says the University of Iowa team, is for online dating sites to match users based on their past interests and actions, rather than on what they say they’re interested in. Think about your Netflix account. Netflix recommends movies based on what you’ve watched and the amount of time you spent watching it – so even if you profess to be a documentary lover, if all you watch is Gossip Girl, Netflix is probably going to suggest more CW-style teen dramedies.

Love and attraction are about as inexplicable as it gets, but that doesn’t mean scientists aren’t determined to try. More and more studies are attempting to uncover the secrets of attraction, especially when it comes to dating online, the big question being: if we figure out how the process works, can we learn to hack it?

Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick of Northwestern University are two of the researchers studying online dating. In a breakthrough 2008 study, the duo found that, although men and women say they look for different things in a mate (men tend to prioritize looks, while women prioritize money), there’s no difference in the types of partners the two sexes actually choose in real life.

Finkel and Eastwick took their research farther, finding that there’s little association between the traits people claim that want in a partner and what they are actually attracted to when they meet potential dates face to face. In other words, that laundry list of must-haves and dealbreakers you’ve created is probably useless. At the end of the day, attraction and compatibility just don’t work like that.

In part, Finkel and Eastwick say, this is because the way we pair up on online dating sites is different from the way we evaluate our relationships later on. When we search through profiles on an online dating site, we’re in “joint evaluation mode,” in which we compare multiple potential dates against one another based on factors like income and attractiveness. On the other hand, when we make relationship decisions, we’re in “separate evaluation mode,” in which we judge only one person against the question “Are they right for me?”

In joint evaluation mode, we are likely to focus on the qualities we think are important rather than the qualities that are actually predictive of a healthy relationship. A profile on a computer screen is unable to convey the information we really need to know – hence the importance of in-person meetings, where the real work of assessing compatibility can begin. So although online dating sites do a great job of expanding the dating pool for users, they “do not always improve romantic outcomes; indeed, they sometimes undermine such outcomes.”

Still, despite their limitations, Finkel and Eastwick aren’t totally down on online dating services. When asked if he would use them, Finkel responded enthusiastically:

“Hell yes. It’s probably a bit worse than meeting people organically through one’s existing social network, but, outside of that option, it’s probably as good an approach as any. But it’s important to realize what online dating can and can’t do. It can expand the pool of potential partners, making available a whole slew of people who otherwise would have been unavailable. That’s a huge, huge benefit. But, at least thus far, it can’t figure out who’s compatible with you. That’s your job.”

Related Article: How To Date Like A Social Scientist: Part I

Ashley Madison, the infamous dating website that makes its revenue from matching married people looking for affairs, has now admitted to spying on its own users.

A recent study published by the company was gathered from emails the sites’ users sent to each other under what they assumed was a condition of anonymity. According to a recent article in Time Magazine, Eric Anderson, a professor at the University of Winchester in England who conducted the study, claims that “women who seek extra-marital affairs usually still love their husbands and are cheating instead of divorcing, because they need more passion.”

“It is very clear that our model of having sex and love with just one other person for life has failed— and it has failed massively,” Anderson tells Time.

As it turns out, Ashlay Madison seems to have commissioned this study to boost its membership numbers - that is, to prove that almost every person in a monogomous relationship is looking to cheat, (and therefore should join their website). But for those who join the site on a strict condition of anonymity because they don’t want their partners to find out, this study is a direct infringement on their right to privacy.

So Ashley Madison is now in a tricky spot. Has it alienated its members, since now they know their emails are no longer strictly confidential, but subject to studies and read by a third party? Perhaps it was in the fine print when they joined the site, as most dating sites collect user information for the purposes of research. But most don’t analyze individual emails being sent back and forth between individual users.

As Time Magazine also points out, because of the nature of the dating site, and the fact that most of its members are being dishonest or lying by the mere fact that they are using the site for an extramarital affair, it calls into question the integrity of the data itself. Who knows what is true and what isn’t in each email? Who can say that anyone on the site is honest in any email they send to another site user?

According to Anderson, his data “included profile information that the women supplied when they signed up for the site (information not made available to other Ashley Madison users),” as well as information other users could see. “We also acquired all private message conversations that [users] had with men on the website for one month,” Anderson told Time.

The results of the study are still somewhat questionable. Anderson claims that in our sexualized culture, married folks could feel as if they are missing out when they are only having sex with one partner.

While this might be true for the users of Ashley Madison, it doesn't mean that it's applicable to the majority of married couples in the U.S.

There is quite possibly nothing in this world that perplexes us more than that strange collection of physical and emotional responses we call love. Humans have been trying to understand it since the dawn of…well…humans, in poetry, in art, in music, and in laboratories.

Writer Olga Khazan, in an article for The Atlantic, explores recent research being done into the murky, inexplicable world of online dating. These studies are designed to determine “what makes people desire each other digitally,” she writes, “as well as whether our first impressions of online photos ultimately matter.”

What do social scientists know that you don’t?

First, your face plays an important role in your romantic fate – which means yes, your photos matter. Some evidence suggests that qualities like extraversion, emotional stability, and self-esteem can be read in a person’s physical appearance. For example, writes Khazan, “Hockey players with wider faces, considered a sign of aggression, spend more time in the penalty box.” On a basic level, then, strangers viewing your dating profile may be making judgements about your personality on a subconscious level, solely from your photos.

But pictures are not the end of the process. Nuances of personality are only revealed through interaction, and looks can be deceiving. Personality may supersede looks as we get to know someone – or, explains Khazan, “at the very least, we tend to find people more attractive when we think they have good personalities.”

Frequently, we end up pairing off with partners who match us in level of attractiveness. Which brings up another question: should you date someone who looks like you? Psychologists say the answer is no. Khazan describes another experiment, in which “subjects who thought they were similar to one another were more likely to be attracted to each other, but that wasn’t the case for those who were actually similar to one another.” Where speech is concerned, however, couples with similar speech styles are more likely to remain in a relationship than couples with differing speech styles.

Then there’s the question on everyone’s mind: will online dating actually lead to a relationship? A 2008 study by Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick at Northwestern University attempted to uncover the answer, and found it to be much more complicated than a simple yes or no. Online dating does give us more options than ever before but, as Finkel and Eastwick discovered, that isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Stay tuned for their discoveries in Part II.