When people choose a couple on the Internet, they attach great importance to things that in reality are not important to them. Who we really love to hang tags with is people. On dating sites, almost the most important description of yourself is the choice between a Republican or a Democrat. This is even more important than an atheist or a believer. People are obsessed with definitions. The site offers them to choose the features of a potential ideal partner, and they write something like: “I am looking for a democrat who loves dogs, a non-smoking agnostic and an ardent lover who never had children.”
However, the textual analysis of the messages exchanged between users shows that all these indicators do not really affect whether you will ultimately like the person. It’s hard to believe, but more important are the answers to questions such as “Do you like horror movies?” And “Have you ever traveled alone?”
Of course, prejudice is manifested mainly in relation to appearance. Once, an experiment was conducted when users’ photos were hidden for 7 hours, so everyone was forced to communicate “blindly” with each other. At this wonderful time, people began to respond to strangers’ messages 40% more often. 24% of people who managed to talk during this time liked each other so much that they exchanged phones and made an appointment. This is two times more than usual.
But when they again opened access to photographs, most of the people abruptly stopped communicating with those who they liked in absentia. Online dating gives us the opportunity to find out information about people, which, perhaps, only prevents us from finding “their” person. It is easy to find single women by political views, height, photo, because everything is so conveniently “sorted”. Simply, perhaps this is not the information on the basis of which we should draw such important conclusions.
Do not upload perfect photos
The contradictory value is higher than the quality and the average. Surprisingly, this works even at the level of the main criterion for online dating – appearance. In the photographs of the most popular girls, always something differs from the ideal norm: someone has glasses, someone has a lip piercing, someone eats a huge, disgusting burger. Girls (and men) with some slight flaws receive 70% more messages than certainly attractive ones. Although users do not see the attractiveness scale, they conceive it in such a way that negative reviews paradoxically end up positively affecting their choice. The fact that someone does not like you gives you an advantage.
The attractiveness of some strangeness, a slight deviation from the ideal, psychologists call the term “oversight effect.” It is inherent in us at the most basic level. For example, a fragrance seems to us more attractive if it has some kind of dissonance, so a few percent of indole, a substance with an unpleasant odor, is often added to perfumes.
Creatively use copy-paste
More than 20% of chat messages on dating sites are created with a few taps on the keyboard. How can this be? All this is copy-paste. People write one message and send it to dozens of recipients. Someone lazy is limited to short “you are pretty”, “do not want to chat?”, But many go further and compose such messages, looking at which it is difficult to believe that they are not intended for you alone.
It may seem disgusting to you, but the reality is that the more you send messages, the more answers you receive. Copywriters respond to messages with 25% more recipients than those who write original messages for everyone. But it’s not only that. The author of this message knows exactly what he is looking for – a smoking woman who knows architecture and likes to travel or is interested in interracial dating in the US. He scatters seeds in the hope that there is one that suits him.
