Online dating: love in the time of the internet

The co-founder of internet dating giant OkCupid, Christian Rudder, recently announced in his blog that his company ‘doesn’t really know what it’s doing’ when it comes to matchmaking. This might have dismayed his clients, but it backs up what psychologists have been saying for some time about dating sites: that despite being easy to use and offering endless choice, they do a fairly poor job of steering us towards people we might actually like.

Every other dating site argues the opposite, of course. Most claim that their complex algorithms increase the chances of us meeting someone compatible. They boast high success rates: Match.com maintains that more than a million babies have been born to couples who met on its site, while eHarmony claims responsibility for nearly five per cent of marriages in the States. Yet the evidence suggests online matchmaking is still a hit-and-miss affair. Despite the huge numbers of people in Britain using dating sites — some six million log on every month — only eight per cent of those in a relationship met their partner online, according to a YouGov survey carried out in December last year.

When you look into the science of attraction and relationships, it’s not hard to see why meeting someone compatible via a dating website’s algorithm should be such a challenge. Consider how we make decisions about people in the real world. If you are introduced to someone at a party, you know pretty quickly whether you’re interested in them, or whether you have enough in common to want to see them again. Such choices are largely intuitive: our social radar, honed over hundreds of thousands of years of group living, is finely tuned, and operates almost entirely beneath our conscious awareness.

Online, however, we rarely get the chance to use these intuitive social smarts. Most dating sites try to do precisely the opposite: engage the rational, analytical side of our brain. This is great when we’re trying to decide on a savings scheme or to plan a cycle route, but for complex social decisions, such as who to date, it’s not helpful. The choices and permutations are too overwhelming.

Moreover, we are not good at predicting who our ideal partner might be. Paul Eastwick, a psychologist at Northwestern University in Illinois, has found that while men and women often appear certain when asked about the kind of person they’d like to date — men (more than women) say they value physical attractiveness; women (more than men) say they value earning potential — these preferences have no bearing on how people decide in face-to-face encounters, when using their instinct. In general, the things we find attractive on paper, or in an online profile, are very different to the things we find attractive in person.

Two years ago, a group of American psychologists led by Eli Finkel, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, articulated this in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Online dating profiles ‘reduce three-dimensional people to two-dimensional displays of information’, they claimed. ‘In addition, the ready access to a large pool of potential partners… can cause people to make lazy, ill-advised decisions.’ Finkel believes that real-life social interaction elicits something crucial that online profiles cannot. ‘Science hasn’t yet figured out exactly what that “something” is,’ he says.

Is it possible to navigate the online dating world in ways that bring our intuition to the fore, to increase the chances of us finding someone we’re attracted to? I have a particular interest in this question. This autumn, I’m launching a social experiment called 21Pictures that uses insights from the psychology of decision-making (in particular the interplay between rational analysis and intuitive action) to help people make better choices when dating online. We’re asking people to describe themselves entirely in pictures — the idea being that pictures, when they represent someone’s whole life (rather than simply what they look like), are better than words at portraying the kind of contextual information that we’re all naturally good at picking up on. The aim is to make online dating as much like offline dating as possible.

There is plenty of evidence that pictures can tell us very effectively what someone is like, and what they share in common with us. For example, we can determine how trustworthy somebody is just by glancing at an image of their face. Researchers have found that it takes 100 milliseconds to make this kind of judgement, which suggests it is entirely intuitive.

But some of the most telling information comes from the peripheral clues in pictures. A person’s fashion sense, or the places they hang out, or how they decorate their flat, can help us assess whether we might ‘fit’ with them.

London-based photographer Saskia Nelson runs a business called Saturday Night’s Alright, producing images for online daters. She says the things to consider first in dating pictures are clothes, hair and accessories such as jewellery and scarves. ‘These basic elements give huge clues as to which tribe you belong to: hipster, retro rocker, fashionista, City boy.’ Background is also important. ‘It makes a difference whether your photo is taken in the cooler parts of town like Dalston, down by the canal or in a bustling market,’ she says. She also helps clients to express their personality through the use of props such as hats, headphones, books, bicycles and cameras. Best of all, she advises being photographed ‘doing something you love, as that gives people a real insight, plus you’ll look relaxed and happy.’