Today, there is an online dating service or app for almost any type of category. From general dating apps like Tinder, Zoosk, or Grindr to religious apps like JSwipe (“Jewish Tinder”) there are plenty of ways to find your match. Dating apps can be a very easy and quick way to match with people of interest without the hassle of striking up a conversation in public and trying to figure out if two people are compatible. Not only do dating apps open someone to more opportunities to meet new people, but also it can be done on their own time. Logging in whenever you want does not cut in to your normal schedule or take time away from dating in real life, but rather add another tool to find potential relationships.
A recent study called, ‘‘A Match Made.Online?’’ The Effects of User-Generated Online Dater Profile Types (Free-Spirited Versus Uptight) on Other Users’ Perception of Trustworthiness, Interpersonal Attraction, and Personality focused on two types of dating profiles and they are perceived by other daters. The two types of profiles examined were free-spirited and uptight. In this experiment, people were randomly assigned a type of profile and asked to explain their perception of the online dater. This study focused on gaining information about self-presentation and the presentation of others. Eventually, the two groups were differentiated based on long-term versus short-term relationship goals. The aim of the experiment was to provide essential information about online dating to online dating users, managers, and researchers.
The results proved that participants in the open conditions perceived the dater to be more ope
n than those in the traditional conditions. The profiles seemed more open based on the photos, locations, and interests of the dater. Additionally, free-spirited people were perceived to be more actively seeking daters. On the other hand, daters in the uptight conditions were perceived more “trustworthy, interpersonally attractive, agreeable, conscientious, and neurotic.”
Goffman introduced a theory knows as “self presentation” even before the use of Internet. This theory relates to people managing and manipulating their appearance and manner based on the interests of others, while at the same time the others are developing a perception of that person. This theory becomes more complicated in the world of online dating, because people can only create one profile at a time on each dating source. While Goffman proposed the self-presentation theory, Turkle further applies it to online dating. She explains how the online dating world leaves people with limitless opportunities to create multiple identities. Being able to try multiple identities in the online dating world poses a threat to relationships because eventually online relationships will lead to offline ones.
Ellison explains how deception is always easy to control in online dating. Misrepresenting one’s height is a minimal error, but a huge misrepresentation of a profile, like one’s gender, defeats the purpose of online dating and weakens it transparency.
Self-representation was the main focus of the study because that is all users have to interpret one’s profile. The idea of “selling yourself” is the main concept behind online dating. Interpersonal trust, “the reliance upon the communication of another person in order to achieve a desired but uncertain objective in a risky situation”, cannot be established without source credibility perception.
An additional relevant theory is this study is the Interpersonal Deception Theory (IDT) which examines trustworthiness of profiles. Credibility of profiles is based on competence, composure, sociability, and dynamism. In this case, the free-spirited profiles seemed more open to many interests while the uptight profiles seemed more close-minded. Also, the open profiles were perceived to be interested in more profiles base don more profiles, while the uptight daters seemed more interested in only around 10 other daters. This information may lead users to view open/free- spirited daters as more strategic than traditional/uptight daters because they provided more alluring photos and more popular interests. Traditional/uptight daters might appear more credible because they present themselves as less interested in popularity by following less people.
However, if daters based their perceptions on sociability and dynamism open daters seemed more credible. This idea is based on IDT’s recognition of the “truth bias, a natural human tendency to assume others are telling the truth.”
The results showed that participants in the open conditions perceived the target dater as more open in terms of profile photo, location, and interest than those in the traditional conditions. Also, those in the open conditions perceived the dater to be more “actively seeking daters” than those in the traditional conditions. And lastly, participants in the uptight conditions perceived the dater to be more trustworthy, interpersonally attractive, agreeable, conscientious, and neurotic than those in the free-spirited conditions.
Overall, the main factor of how online daters perceived profiles was trust. However, it is a little contradictory because you never really know if what you are seeing is really true. It all depends on the daters feeling and perception towards the profile. Another study explains why online realtionships are more prone to breakups. Some of the factors includes, lack of information about the person, and the idea that they were just someone you met online with less importance than someone you meet in person.
