Why Tinder doesn’t get you good dates
Tinder‘s main focus is on pictures – which is also its biggest flaw. While there is still room for a bio, users often perceive anything longer than a paragraph as vain or desperate, preferring to write something vague, fill it with emojis or with nothing at all.
The app’s focus on pictures may be the reason why you never find good dates, as the Independent reports. Research has found that good looking pictures can only take a user so far, because most of the times a good personality is key to securing a second date.
Researchers at the University of Kansas investigated how a person’s perception of others changes once they meet face-to-face. Jeffery Hall, associate professor of communication studies talked with Daily Mail about this. “With Tinder and user-directed online dating services, people try to manage the vast number of profiles by picking the most attractive people,” he said.
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“Several researchers have made the critique that that is not the best way to find a partner,” Hall added. “We wanted to look at how physical attractiveness ratings change and whether evaluating a person’s photo in a lineup helps or hurts the interaction you’re going to have.”
For the study, the researchers observed 65 pairs of strangers divided into three groups. One group was shown 10 pictures of strangers and asked to judge how attractive they are, before meeting the strangers and having a 10-minute conversation with each of them. After this, they were asked to reevaluate the attractiveness of the 10 strangers. The conclusion was that face-to-face meetings made the attractiveness of a person go up.
However, the increase mostly happened in the case of people ranked middle to low in attractiveness before the meeting. Those in the “middle” category received higher ratings for being friendly and funny, while those considered good looking did not receive higher ratings after the meeting.
The other two groups in the study were participants who did not rate their partner before meeting them. The results revealed that rating their partner beforehand decreased the enjoyment of the interaction. “Using physical attractiveness to sort people to date is a bad strategy,” Hall explained. “It misses a lot of what makes for a good conversation, and the characteristics of a good conversational partner change how attractive they are in your eyes.”
Hall’s advice for online daters is to slow down, assess one’s personality and ask themselves if they would really like to spend time with a person instead of going through hundreds of photos.
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