getting the complete picture about a partner

if we are looking for a romantic partner it is important to get the complete & whole picture of who they are rather than breaking all their attributes down into pieces & analyzing them with our mind too much.  Unfortunately this is just what online dating sites rely on in profiles, where all interests & personality traits are listed.  Dan Ariely, Director of The Center for Advanced Hindsight, thinks that this encourages superficial assessments of others & causes a lot of dissatisfaction with online dating sites.

I watched a video interview with Dan on big think about ‘Why Online Dating is So Unsatisfying’ by David Hirschman.  Here is some of the transcript:

….online dating sites assume that people are easy to describe on searchable attributes.  They think that we’re like digital cameras, that you can describe somebody by their height and weight and political affiliation and so on. But it turns out people are much more like wine.  That when you taste the wine, you could describe it, but it’s not a very useful description.  But you know if you like it or don’t.  And it’s the complexity and the completeness of the experience that tells you if you like a person or not.  And this breaking into attributes turns out not to be very informative.

Dan has been researching

….real dates—and think about what real dates are.  They’re not about sitting in the room and interviewing each other about questions; they’re often about experiencing something together in the real world. And I think it’s because if you and I went out, and we went somewhere, I would look at how you react to the outside world.  What music you like, what you don’t like, what kind of pictures you like, what kind of images, how do you react to other people, what do you do in the restaurant?  And through all these kind of non-explicit aspects, I will learn something about you and I would feel that I’m learning something about you.

I think that online dating is an incredibly unsatisfying experience.  In fact, when we do surveys to understand what people do, the basic trade off is for each six hours of searching for people and emailing them, you get one cup of coffee.  And it’s not as if people enjoy online dating, it’s not as if they have fun searching people and writing blurbs for them.  I mean, imagine that you basically had to drive six hours, three hours each way to have coffee with somebody, and, you know, coffee usually ends up with just coffee.  It’s an incredibly unsatisfying experience.  So I think it’s a really bad, it’s a really bad system.

On top of that, there’s another thing, is which, imagine I gave you this search criteria, which I asked you to search by height and weight and income and all of those things: you’re going to use it. That’s what I give you to search, you’re going to use it.  There’s a million people out there, you want to limit them to 3,000, that’s what we’re going to, that’s what you’re going to use.  And because of that, I think actually people become much more superficial than we think they are.  So here’s an example.  It turns out, women really care about men’s height.  I’m 5’9”, if I wanted to be as attractive as somebody who’s 5’10”, right, another inch?  I would have to make about $35-40,000 more a year.  That’s a lot of money for one inch.  At the same time, it turns out that men care a lot about women’s BMI’s.  In fact, they want women to be slightly anorexic, at like 18-1/2.  And you look at women’s attractiveness, it goes really up at low BMI and really drops below that.

Now, people online look incredibly superficial.  They look at hair color and they look at height and they look at income, and that’s basically it… and attractiveness, of course.  And you can ask, is it because that’s all people care about or is that because that’s what the system is giving them to search for.  And I think it’s because of combination, right?  Sure, we are superficial, we do care about attractiveness and height and income and these are features for us, but I think they’re exaggerated by the way the system is created.

I think that online dating is an incredibly unsatisfying experience.  In fact, when we do surveys to understand what people do, the basic trade off is for each six hours of searching for people and emailing them, you get one cup of coffee.  And it’s not as if people enjoy online dating, it’s not as if they have fun searching people and writing blurbs for them.  I mean, imagine that you basically had to drive six hours, three hours each way to have coffee with somebody, and, you know, coffee usually ends up with just coffee.  It’s an incredibly unsatisfying experience.  So I think it’s a really bad, it’s a really bad system.
On top of that, there’s another thing, is which, imagine I gave you this search criteria, which I asked you to search by height and weight and income and all of those things: you’re going to use it. That’s what I give you to search, you’re going to use it.  There’s a million people out there, you want to limit them to 3,000, that’s what we’re going to, that’s what you’re going to use.  And because of that, I think actually people become much more superficial than we think they are.  So here’s an example.  It turns out, women really care about men’s height.  I’m 5’9”, if I wanted to be as attractive as somebody who’s 5’10”, right, another inch?  I would have to make about $35-40,000 more a year.  That’s a lot of money for one inch.  At the same time, it turns out that men care a lot about women’s BMI’s.  In fact, they want women to be slightly anorexic, at like 18-1/2.  And you look at women’s attractiveness, it goes really up at low BMI and really drops below that.
Now, people online look incredibly superficial.  They look at hair color and they look at height and they look at income, and that’s basically it… and attractiveness, of course.  And you can ask, is it because that’s all people care about or is that because that’s what the system is giving them to search for.  And I think it’s because of combination, right?  Sure, we are superficial, we do care about attractiveness and height and income and these are features for us, but I think they’re exaggerated by the way the system is created.

I think Dan is onto something, although I’m not sure the answer is virtual dating?  It may appeal to some but it doesn’t to me.  I would prefer the excitement & interest of getting to know a real person not an avatar with a person in the background.  But each to his own & this may work for others?  How do you feel about this, let me know in the comments.

I’d like to leave you with a very funny video of Advice for Young Girls from The Little Mermaid, hysterical, enjoy…

Related articles by Zemanta

• ‘Why Online Dating Is So Unsatisfying’ (thetylerhayes.com)
• A mixed take on the online dating thing (chicagonow.com)
• The Benefits of Dating Online (datingwebsites.org)
• The Big Lies People Tell In Online Dating [Dating] (gizmodo.com)
• Online dating’s most common fibs (newsfeed.time.com)
• Algorithmic Online Dating and the Paradox of Choice (openresearch.wordpress.com)
• Can you be beautiful but not superficial? (psychologytoday.com)
• Why Consumers Aren’t As Crazy As They Seem (usnews.com)
• Are You Ready for Love? (lifescript.com)
• Online Dating Sites Make People Seem More Superficial (economix.blogs.nytimes.com)