Off the Record #4: Understanding Valentine’s Day
A Behavioral Science firm’s approach to the holiday of Love
- What are our expectations for Valentine’s Day?
- How do men and women differ in our preferences for a partner?
- What love language do people prefer in times of need?
These are some of the questions we sought to answer in our latest “Off the Record” study, a type of research where we collect data using the most agile methods (SMS messages, M-Turk, WhatsApp, etc). We do this to answer research questions in a fast and nimble way, to gain an initial sense of results and most importantly, to start a conversation.
To celebrate the week of love, we explored the theme of relationships, romance and, of course, Valentine’s Day itself. We ran a quick study on 331 university students from Nairobi aged 20–28 who received our survey link via WhatsApp. Here are some of our results below, access our full report for more insights!
1. What are people’s expectations of Valentine’s Day?
Somewhat unsurprisingly, Valentine’s Day is mostly considered a romantic holiday by both men and women. However, more men qualify the holiday as “romantic” (44.9% vs 38.9% for women), and more women as “very romantic”. How did our participants draw the line between what is considered (normal) romantic and very romantic? For some, “romantic” might mean a restaurant date and a gift while for others, that same description would qualify as “very romantic”. We did not go into this level of detail for the study, but are still curious to learn more about this — email us to share your research design ideas!
2. How do peoples own preferences compare to their beliefs about other’s preferences for Valentines Day?
First things first, avoid an ice-cream date on Valentine’s Day: it is low on the list of preferences for most of our participants. The juicy data lies in the discrepancies between personal preference and perceived preference, as this highlights some of the social norms which may exist about the holiday. Interestingly, the two highest personal preferences are for flowers and time together, but the perceived preferences are reversed: while participants believe others want more flowers, they don’t care much for them themselves, whereas they would like to spend more time together. This is evidenced again with a higher preference for a romantic dinner, a casual dinner, or time alone. After all, us humans may not be the complex creatures we make ourselves out to be: we just want to connect with loved ones and spend time together!
2. What do people look for in a partner?
- The interest in shared interests is — how fitting — shared across both genders (29%).
- Women (28%) care more about friendship than men (21%).
- Women (10%) chose sensitivity as the second most important trait in a partner compared to men (3%).
- Good looks appeal to men (15%) more than women (9%).
- Men (25%) care more about intelligence than women (20%).
3. What love language do people prefer when they feel down?
Do you know your love language? This theory developed by bestselling author Gary Chapman states that just as languages differ across nations causing imperfect communication and a wide scope for misinterpretation, so does each individual have a “love language of choice”, through which they express and expect to receive love from their partner. A mismatch is the unknowing source of many an argument: “why did you bring me flowers when all I wanted was a hug / help in the house / to spend time with you / a card with a love note?!”. In this measure, the results differed widely across genders. When feeling down, women prefer physical touch compared to men, while men prefer words of affirmation compared to women.
More findings are accessible in our full report here, which we haven’t analyzed in more depth as the founding principle of this type of work is its speed and ease. However, we will do more such work over the next few months, so please reach out to us on Twitter if you would like any research question answered — we’ll see what we can do!
A final note
Our goal is to make research accessible in order to start, continue or inform conversations that help us better understand human behavior.
With this in mind, each “Off The Record” post provides access to the full findings from our studies, freely available here.
As a commitment to Open Science, we keep this anonymized data live at this page for all our on-going research efforts.
