Some Clarification 

A response to SB’s questions about ‘The Book of Heather’

Link to ‘The Book of Heather’: https://medium.com/psyc-406/b544f2fa168c

Link to SB’s questions: https://medium.com/psyc-406/9ba77489631b

This post is a response to SB’s questions about ‘The Book of Heather.’ First of all I’d like to apologize to SB for the lateness of this reply, but as a fellow student I’m sure she can sympathize. I’d also like to thank her for her interest in my post – I had a good time writing it and I’m glad someone else found it interesting as well.

The first question concerned how Eharmony matches people.

Eharmony apparently uses a ‘special algorithm’ to match people as potential mates. They won’t release this algorithm, which makes sense (any site could start using it), but it’s unfortunate because the research that needs to be done to validate it can’t happen. My best guess is that Eharmony matches people based on their similarities. I would think that they would focus on people’s similarities in terms of values and goals, as opposed to personality dimensions (such as both people being extroverted). In the questionnaire they ask a lot of questions about what you value in a mate and what’s most important to you in a relationship so that probably carries quite a bit of weight as well.

The second question was about the generality of the personality descriptions.

The descriptions that I posted were actually the summaries of each section that they gave. The entire ‘Book of Heather’ was actually about ten pages long. It was an extraordinary amount of information so I cut it way down. I don’t think anyone on Medium is that interested in my personality – even I found it quite tedious after a while. The actual descriptions they gave were incredibly detailed and they did include some negative aspects as well. They framed the negatives in terms of how it would affect me in a relationship and offered advice as to what to do about it.

The third question asked about my accuracy ratings.

I think my accuracy ratings would definitely be affected by the time of day, my mood, and all others kinds of factors. If I went back and redid them now, they would probably be different. Such is the nature of subjective ratings I suppose. Like I said in my post, I think it’s incredibly hard to have a good perspective on your own personality and it might be interesting to have a family member or friend give it a shot. In terms of posting all this on the internet, I don’t really mind it so much and I tried to be as honest as possible.

The final question concerned how Eharmony generates these personality descriptions.

I think there must be some kind of cut-off system, but I can’t really say what the nature of it might be. All I know is that there is definitely not a psychologist writing up a ten page personality evaluation for each Eharmony member. Although the ‘Book of Heather’ was very detailed and felt very personal, it has to be some kind of mash-up of pre-determined responses. It would be interesting to see how similar or dissimilar my ‘Book’ is to those of other Eharmony members.

Thank you for your questions! I hope these answers give you a little bit more insight.