The problem with online dating profiles
The lack of authenticity in online dating profiles
Perception is Reality
A unique phenomenon that’s happening in Online Dating is that we have the ability to control how people perceive us. When you think about it that doesn’t happen in real life. If I walk into a room, I can’t change how you’re going to perceive me. But because in many ways Online Dating is framed as shopping for humans, you are incentivized to “sell” yourself in the market.
Who you are vs. who you say you are
The consequence of this phenomenon is that is creates a larger gap between of who you are vs. who you say you are. This makes it more difficult for people to get a sense of the real you. Being in an online environment makes you less inclined to share as well. This creates a series of issues:
1. Not attracting people who are compatible with you
While mystery and intrigue is part of the game, by withholding key information you are casting too wide of a net. If you rely on photos, then you’re only being asked to be judged by your looks. If you take the time to craft your profile, you can reveal some attributes and signal to other types who might be compatible with your personality too.
2. Creating unrealistic expectations = disappointment
The reverse effect can also occur where you keep portraying yourself in an idealized light and setup unrealistic expectations about yourself. While this might be ideal in getting swipes, it might hurt you once you get to the dating part where you won’t be able to hide your quirks.
3. You come across as generic
Another common thing that occurs is that people are not specific or descriptive enough in their profiles. While you might think you’re appealing to the masses but you also risk not standing out that much from the crowd. By providing less useful information, people are forced to make a snap judgement on the information they do have, not what information they don’t have (which are all the wonderful things about you).
We’re not good at describing ourselves + dating apps oversimplify humans = poor matching
There’s really two issues. The first is that people feed poor information or include information not really relevant to compatibility. But it’s not users’ fault completely, it’s also apps/platforms. The data they collect to describe people are just not good at capturing human behaviour. They only capture your preferences. The filters are synonymous to Amazon search filters.
I recently listened to Dan Ariely’s talk at Google on Love & Relationships. He’s a behavioural scientist and an expert in the online dating space as a consultant and researcher. He said something really poignant to this issue:
“Part of the problem in these apps, we don’t describe people in a way that tells us anything how to understand them. What does it mean to be with that person?
Imagine if way we described the food in restaurants by their ingredients rather than the names of the dishes. For example, the number of protein and vitamins. That information is completely useless. It’s like reading the nutrition label. We describe people similarly by height, weight, and religion. In what way is it giving any insight on what that person is like?
Well, what happens when you don’t know much about a person? You are very risk averse.
In the spirit is that all that matters is the picture, we are misclassifying lots of people.”
Less information = take less risks = less dates
Humans are very risk averse when we don’t have a lot of information. This may explain why people are not willing to make a move and revert to behaviours to “play it safe”. This explains a lot of the small talk which also leads to poor conversation. People don’t have a clue about what you might be interested in talking about. So you’re stuck in this meaningless conversations which it doesn’t help you decide whether you want to date them. The point of online dating is to DATE right?
How can we solve this?
I wonder if we put more descriptive information in our profiles that reflect our real identities if it would improve the matching process. A few questions come to mind:
- Is it even possible to present your authentic self digitally?
- In what ways would people feel comfortable representing a more authentic version of their personality?
- What is authentic? What makes me feel empathy towards someone?
Prototyping for Authenticity
While I think there are a variety of problems that I could tackle in online dating, this seems the most compelling to me because it could potentially improve the process in a significant way. My next step is to devise a small test/experiment to answer any of my questions above. I’ll keep you posted!
