August 5, 2009 • 20 mins
Online dating is an increasingly popular way of meeting people, but does it really work? Molly and Cristen discuss how online dating compares to regular dating in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From House Towards dot com. Hey there, and welcome to
the podcast. And Kristen and I am Molly. So Molly.
(00:21):
I got some news from one of my best friends.
Her brother is getting married. She was exciting and little
interesting tidbit about this is he and his fiancee met online.
He moved to a big city and he was just
having a hard time like meeting girls. It was just
(00:42):
kind of just nothing was really working out. So he
decided to take the plunge, got online, ended up meeting
this girl and they've been together now for I don't know,
maybe three three years, and now they're getting married. Congratulations
to them. But they're still kind of keeping it quiet
that they met online. Yes, not that they're getting married. Yeah, yeah,
I know they're letting people know they're getting married. But
(01:04):
I don't think that he's told, like his parents, that
they met online, because they just don't even want to
have that conversation. They don't even want to, you know,
get the strange looks, you know that sometimes they have
some sort of fake here's how we met story. I
guess so, yeah, I guess they feel like there might
be you know, there's still a lingering stigma a little
bit on online dating. But I think that you could
(01:26):
also say that it's becoming a lot more commonplace. I
have friends who are in their early twenties who are
getting online. Oh yeah, I think everyone knows the success
story of someone who's getting married or at least he's had,
you know, a good success relationship out of online dating.
A ton of stories popping up about it lately, So
we decided to tackle whether online dating works. It's online
(01:47):
dating work? Did you see those those really casual match
dot com commercials? All those handsome couples who just happened
to meet online and match perfectly. So maybe there's something
to the you know, the supposed science behind online dating.
But you know, matchmaking nothing new. Um, it's just online now.
(02:10):
But what used to happen is there were these uh,
matrimonial agencies in the seventeen hundreds. We're reading about this
in Live Science, and you would place a printed ad
basically a printed personal ad uh for you know, lonely
bachelors who are looking for wives. But you know it
was pretty unpopular. It had the sort of stigma that
sometimes online dating still has now. And that's thing that
(02:31):
kind of waxes in Waynes with the times, according to
Live Science. Right. According to that article, UM personal ads
became more popular um in the early twentieth centuries, especially
during World War One, when you would have these lonely
soldiers who were just looking for a pen pal or
a girlfriend or something. It just became a little more mainstream,
became the bohemian thing to do to look for comfort.
(02:53):
And you know one of my favorite movies, Shop around
the Corner pen Pals. You know, communitying be a written
word seems very appealing, especially to me. I'm a writer,
so right, I can understand it. But the police did not.
The police thought that the kind of people who are
placing these ads were just well, they were trying to
perpetrate scams. They were perverse, they were dangerous individuals. Police
(03:16):
in the late sties were thinking this was mainly prostitutes
and gay men placing these ads. But then it becomes
more acceptable in the nineties with the web. You have
things like Craigslist, you have chat rooms like people being
a lot more comfortable with divulging personal um information about themselves.
(03:39):
Now we have things like Facebook where people put up
sometimes far too detailed profiles and pictures that you never
really wanted to see, the pictures that are far too cousins. Um.
We just become a lot more comfortable with this idea
of meeting people in general online. So it's a natural
extension that you would be able to build a profile
much as you would a Facebook profile, just say, make
(04:00):
the statement I'm looking for love, come find me. Yeah,
and let's and let's face it, dating is not easy, um,
different in my experience, but it does seem like, you know,
it could take some of the guesswork out of having
to you know, kiss all the frogs to find your
prince or princess. Well, it's also convenient, you know, you
can sit at home in your pajamas and be like yes, no, yes, no,
(04:23):
that seems appealing. And and you know, maybe by the
time you meet your I know you've got X, Y
and Z in common. Um. And I was to do
some casual research for this episode. I got on my
friends match dot com profile just to see how it
all works. IM only I could if I got on there,
(04:44):
I would lose hours and hours there's so many different
ways to slice and dice who's looking at your profile,
who's interested in you. You can say you know whether
or not you're interested in them back. You can wink
at someone. She was telling me that the the protocol
with winks is if a guy winks you, then you
(05:04):
can either wink back at him to give him the
go ahead to email you, or you can just take
the reins from that wink and contact him directly, which
just baffles girls. Ever, wink first. I'm sure girls can
wink first. Ladies, please wink first. I hope that's not
you know, the girls can't can't wink first. You can
get someone's phone number. There's a thing to click on
(05:26):
there to get someone's phone number. And uh, and it
was kind of funny going through uh, her profile with
her because she had will send you this list of
everyone who is interested in you, and so she like
opened up her inbox with all the people who are
interested and she just started like clicking through them, like
she was going like gane shopping. He's like no, no, no, maybe,
(05:50):
oh god, no, no, you know, and it was just
it was kind of fascinating. But these were these guys
that the site thought that she would get along with. Yeah,
these were people who you and see I think they
were nineteen attributes that you fill out a lot of, uh,
just physical appearance, uh, lifestyle and habits, political views, whether
or not you're an animal, leveragees general things about you,
(06:12):
and so it will show you, um how well you
match up to someone else in all of those characteristics
and match dot Com I think sends you, um like
their own lists of uh that they've called of people
you might be interested in based on your shared interests.
And then I think people can just randomly, you know,
see your picture and thinks that you're you're you're hottie
(06:33):
and wink wink. But see, this is interesting. This is
where online doing has gotten really high tech lately. Like,
you know, being matched up on the basis of like
do you smoke not smoke? Kind of a basic thing.
But now if you go to some of these sites,
you take you know, very long questionnaires on all sorts
of things that you are, about the essence of you
(06:55):
and to under forty eight questions, and that's what they
used to match you up. It's become very uh high tech.
They're all these secret algorithms and people are trying to
wonder is there real science behind this or is it
just a huge money making scheme, because you can't deny
that money is being made. Uh. According to some recent
data from an investment research firm called Piper Jeffrey, Americans
(07:16):
spent one point to billion on online matching sites in
two thousand eight, and the company's predicting that by are
going to be at one point seven billion. Well, it
sounds all the advertisements do sound pretty appealing. If you
you know a company like let's take e harmony dot
com for instance. I think they're one of one of
the most famous for their secret algorithm that I think
(07:36):
they were going to try to patent at some point UM.
And and the way they derived their algorithm was they
took personality profiles of five thousand married couples and then
they scored their personality types UM and compared that to
their level of reported marital happiness UM according to something
(07:58):
called the die datic Ajustment scale. And then from that
they created these twenty nine core traits and vital attributes
that they supposedly match people by. And I think you
have to go through once you joined it, you you
answer two fifty eight questions that sums up your core
traits and vital attributes, and uh, somehow, you know, magic happens.
(08:22):
You know, one of my friends who used said that
she was willing to use this one because the fact
that you had to spend time answering all those questions
at least proved that the people who are there wanted
to be there. Yeah, you weren't just filling out a
random another profile to add to your repertoire. But at
the same time, I think we do have to mention
that e harmony um has gotten a lot of flak
(08:43):
because this algorithm does not take into account uh, homosexual
people like the they can't actually join the site, and
the Harmony says, well, we just used um only heterosexual
couples in our reas search to derive the algorithms, so
it can't really fit. At the same time, it's definitely
(09:03):
been a big PR problem for them. Yeah, and the
PR problem that it seems like all these companies currently
face on office will change in the future is that
no one since they haven't seen the algorithms, there's no
way for it to be subject to a peer review process.
Other scientists and sociologists, psychologists, all these people who would
know about whether these algorithms work in terms of compatibility
can't get their hands on it to review. But the
(09:25):
only you know, measures of success e Harmony has released
other than the commercials that tell all the weddings that
people are having um is one study that compared happiness
between couples who had met on the site and couples
who hadn't met on the site, and they were concluding
that people who had met on the site were much
happier than the other couples. But they were comparing couples
who have been you know, married for six months versus
(09:47):
two years, and so the couples that have married two
years might have been a little more settled out of
that newly wet phase and as a result, that might
have been why they're reporting less happiness. But and I
also think that the Harmony tried to claim that, uh,
they were responsible for something like two of all of
the weddings that happened in the US, like I think
(10:07):
last year, I think a hundred and twenty weddings a
day or something like that, or the Harmony weddings, which
seems pretty impressive. But Helen Fisher over at Chemistry dot com.
We talked about Helen Fisher in episode UM entitled why
is the Sizzle Fizzle. She she's an anthropologist who studies
kind of the the science of love and UH, and
she's trying to get her formula for chemistry dot com
(10:29):
peer reviewed because what she's done is UM taken psychological
and sociological measures and compared that with the levels of
certain UM chemicals in your brains such as UH, dopamine
and nor pephrin that all contribute to um our behavior
when we are in love. And has UH kind of
broken that out into these uh different personality types, like
(10:55):
I think, UM, there are things like builders and a
lot of a tone in you're a builder, Yeah, if
you have testoster and you're a director, and they're also
explorers and negotiators. And she's basically found that people who
are explorers, tentific explorers, builders choose builders, while it's directors
and negotiators select each other. So you know, she's saying,
I can use these chemicals in the brain to predict
(11:17):
who's going to get along. But like the other sites,
not currently peera viewed, but there have been a lot
of other studies peer viewed studies on online dating behavior
and whether or not it really might work. And you know, Kristen,
when we were researching this, some of the studies I
was most interested in were these studies about whether people
(11:38):
are honest online because this is a pretty big, maybe
mental hurdle for a lot of people. You know, we
already know that when people are online, they feel they
can say and do anything, so naturally, if you're trying
to catch a fella, catch a nice lady, you might lie.
And they're finding that people, yes, do lie. About half
of the men lie about their height, more than sixty
(12:00):
percent of participants skew their weight by five pounds or more.
And you know, then there are always correlations that the
people who are shorter and more out of shape are
more likely to lie. I mean, it seems fairly obvious,
but it does happen. There was one steer that showed
the men are mostly going to be you know, a
little bit deceptive about their income, their height, age, and
troubling le marital status. Yeah, there was one disturbing statistic
(12:24):
about the number of men on on these sides who
are already married ladies. So just to be aware note
of caution, and women were just more likely to lie
about their appearance. But you know, then you've got other
people coming in saying who doesn't lie at the beginning
of a relationship. Yeah. One thing I noticed when I
was reading these match dot Com profiles was they were
(12:45):
all so just, you know, breezy and casual, you know,
everyone like you could just there's always like this boilerplate
statement of you know, I just you know, I'm really
just looking for love, I want to soulmate and just
someone to you know, go to dinner with on a
Tuesday night. I mean just like really just out there,
like very very straightforward at the same time, like you know,
(13:07):
just trying to appear as normal as possible, because that's
the kind of statement that would not seem normal if
a guy came up to at a bar and was like,
looking for love, want to be my soul mate, really
want a soul mate. So, on the one hand, you
have people who can be very honest about what they're
looking for. On the other hand, maybe not so honest
about uh who they are. But at the same time,
(13:28):
how are we evaluating that. Obviously, in the back of
our head we know that each profile we look at
may not be particularly honest, but I was interested by
these things about how people evaluate the profiles, which they
started looking at after they realized that a lot of
people would join these sites and become disenchanted very quickly.
They would you know, quit the site, not go on
any dates. There's one statistic from the New York Times that, um,
(13:51):
you know, people who are looking at profiles only go
on dates with fewer than one percent of the people
whose profiles they look at. And then they often claim
these dates are just appointments. So they started looking at
why this was. A group of researchers from Harvard Business School,
Boston University, and M I. T started looking at all
this online dating behavior and uh. They they found that
(14:12):
people often create unrealistic expectations that are just setting them
up for failure. Because you see this profile of someone,
you know, let's take you say, I'm looking for a
guy I find. You know, he just looks so handsome
and all those photos. He seems very well adjusted, he
has a very nice reading list. I like that he kayaks,
(14:33):
you know, so we finally he winks at me, I
wink at M back, and you know, we have magical
trail of emails and uh, and then we finally go
out on a date, and I built him up so
much in my mind that I'm just kind of doomed
to failure because they were saying that you need to
leave a little mystery to h actually make dating, the
(14:53):
actual person to person process of dating a little more exciting.
It's like, we put so much information out there, it's
just not as much of a fun game. And if
you're pre judging that information they found, you know, they
gave online data to a list of attributes, some of
which they felt described them as well and some of
which didn't. And if the first attribute that they stuck
(15:15):
up there didn't jive with the person who saw it,
they were much more likely to negatively judge all the
adjectives that followed, even if all the other adjectives and
qualities that followed were exactly what they were looking for.
As soon as they spotted that one flaw, they're like, nope,
out of here, next one. Yeah, it's just a domino
effect until you just it's like my friend but who
(15:35):
was just like clicking through she would see an attribute
she didn't like, and it was just like done, done, done.
And some people think that this is this is a problem,
this is creating just kind of a throwaway culture. Um,
we already have a divorce rate, and this kind of
behavior is only going to intensify that. There was an
article in Scientific American UM by Robert Epstein and he
(15:56):
was referring to this as the click problem. I thought
it was he was concerned to the fact that not only, um,
are you kind of dating in a socially isolated environment
because you're sitting in front of a computer, but you're
also given all these options that you can just you know,
toss people away with a click. Yeah, as soon as
you as soon as you're done, you're out of there.
(16:17):
And you know, it seems like there are all these
other fish in the see. But you can become overwhelmed
by that much choice is another thing that people are saying, Um,
you know you just read and read these profiles and
you never actually follow up on them. Yeah. There was
UM one study that was discussed in UM Technology Review
from M. I. T. And it was saying that, uh,
you have so many choices that users experience something called
(16:40):
cognitive overload. It's like you just you can't even make
a good decision because you have so many choices in
front of you. And I think that probably what what
part of this might stem from is that we do
hear all these success stories like your friend, UM, I
have friends like this, So we we hear these success stories.
And I think once you make that, men to herdle
and say Okay, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna go
(17:02):
online and date, and when it doesn't happen as easily
as you know it seems like it happens for your friends,
become very frustrated very quickly, right because you think that
the biggest benefit of online dating is that you can
just you know, you can just cut to the chase.
You can find that guy who has your you know,
the list of attributes that you want, and you guys
can meet, you can fall in love and it's going
to be magical. But there was one point raised by
(17:24):
UM a psychologist named Eli Finkel at Northwestern University, and
he was saying that we might be making impossible shopping
lists for a mate because we now have the ability to,
you know, try to like hone in on what we
think is going to be the perfect person. When when
it boils right down to it, sometimes you know, you
really can't explain love. You can't boil love down to
(17:47):
two fifty eight questions despite all our attempts to explain
love on podcasts. Uh So, I think the really the
takeaway is that online dating can work. I mean, you
have to stick with it just as long as you
would stick with real life you know, in real life dating. Right.
That was all that was one of the conclusions from
one of these studies. It was just that the rules
of online dating and real life dating are the same.
(18:07):
You just have to have in front different form of communication.
Kiss your frogs, wait for your prince or princess, wait
for your wings. But while you are waiting for those wings,
if you do have a you know, a lull. One
one good thing to do to take up some time
is read. Are we gonna do reading? We are fans
of reading here at stuff Mom never told you, And
(18:28):
now you guys have been sending in your reading lists
per our request. Thank you very much, And so I
am going to read Sheila in Virginia Beaches reading list.
She has split her summer reading into three sections, which
I'm very impressed with. Sheila. For social studies, she's reading
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Bonk by Mary Roach, and the
(18:50):
Mirror Effect by Drew Pinski and s. Martin Young, and
then an Undead fiction. She is reading Pride and Prejudice
in Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Graham Smith. She's
reading Breathers, a Zombies Lament by S. G. Brown, and
then she's reading blood Sucking Fiends by Christopher Moore. And
then finally the third section is soccer. She's gonna read
(19:12):
The Beckham Experiment by Grant Wall Finn mccool's Football Club
by Stephen ray An Outcasts United by Warren st. John.
Very interesting. That's about UH soccer team not too far
from here in Atlanta, refugees. I'm interesting. I'm interested in
that book as well. Yeah, So if you got any
reading list you want to send us, or if you
have any thoughts on online dating, any success stories, horror stories,
(19:35):
Molly and I would love to hear them, so you
should send us an email at mom stuff at how
stuff works dot com. And as always, you can check
out our blog called how to stuff. And if you
want to learn more about UH finding love and the
chemistry of love and how kissing works and all of that,
you should just head on over to how stuff Works
(19:57):
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how staff works dot com. Brought to you by
the reinvented two thousand twelve Camry. It's ready, Are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From House Towards dot com. Hey there, and welcome to
the podcast. And Kristen and I am Molly. So Molly.
(00:21):
I got some news from one of my best friends.
Her brother is getting married. She was exciting and little
interesting tidbit about this is he and his fiancee met online.
He moved to a big city and he was just
having a hard time like meeting girls. It was just
(00:42):
kind of just nothing was really working out. So he
decided to take the plunge, got online, ended up meeting
this girl and they've been together now for I don't know,
maybe three three years, and now they're getting married. Congratulations
to them. But they're still kind of keeping it quiet
that they met online. Yes, not that they're getting married. Yeah, yeah,
I know they're letting people know they're getting married. But
(01:04):
I don't think that he's told, like his parents, that
they met online, because they just don't even want to
have that conversation. They don't even want to, you know,
get the strange looks, you know that sometimes they have
some sort of fake here's how we met story. I
guess so, yeah, I guess they feel like there might
be you know, there's still a lingering stigma a little
bit on online dating. But I think that you could
(01:26):
also say that it's becoming a lot more commonplace. I
have friends who are in their early twenties who are
getting online. Oh yeah, I think everyone knows the success
story of someone who's getting married or at least he's had,
you know, a good success relationship out of online dating.
A ton of stories popping up about it lately, So
we decided to tackle whether online dating works. It's online
(01:47):
dating work? Did you see those those really casual match
dot com commercials? All those handsome couples who just happened
to meet online and match perfectly. So maybe there's something
to the you know, the supposed science behind online dating.
But you know, matchmaking nothing new. Um, it's just online now.
(02:10):
But what used to happen is there were these uh,
matrimonial agencies in the seventeen hundreds. We're reading about this
in Live Science, and you would place a printed ad
basically a printed personal ad uh for you know, lonely
bachelors who are looking for wives. But you know it
was pretty unpopular. It had the sort of stigma that
sometimes online dating still has now. And that's thing that
(02:31):
kind of waxes in Waynes with the times, according to
Live Science. Right. According to that article, UM personal ads
became more popular um in the early twentieth centuries, especially
during World War One, when you would have these lonely
soldiers who were just looking for a pen pal or
a girlfriend or something. It just became a little more mainstream,
became the bohemian thing to do to look for comfort.
(02:53):
And you know one of my favorite movies, Shop around
the Corner pen Pals. You know, communitying be a written
word seems very appealing, especially to me. I'm a writer,
so right, I can understand it. But the police did not.
The police thought that the kind of people who are
placing these ads were just well, they were trying to
perpetrate scams. They were perverse, they were dangerous individuals. Police
(03:16):
in the late sties were thinking this was mainly prostitutes
and gay men placing these ads. But then it becomes
more acceptable in the nineties with the web. You have
things like Craigslist, you have chat rooms like people being
a lot more comfortable with divulging personal um information about themselves.
(03:39):
Now we have things like Facebook where people put up
sometimes far too detailed profiles and pictures that you never
really wanted to see, the pictures that are far too cousins. Um.
We just become a lot more comfortable with this idea
of meeting people in general online. So it's a natural
extension that you would be able to build a profile
much as you would a Facebook profile, just say, make
(04:00):
the statement I'm looking for love, come find me. Yeah,
and let's and let's face it, dating is not easy, um,
different in my experience, but it does seem like, you know,
it could take some of the guesswork out of having
to you know, kiss all the frogs to find your
prince or princess. Well, it's also convenient, you know, you
can sit at home in your pajamas and be like yes, no, yes, no,
(04:23):
that seems appealing. And and you know, maybe by the
time you meet your I know you've got X, Y
and Z in common. Um. And I was to do
some casual research for this episode. I got on my
friends match dot com profile just to see how it
all works. IM only I could if I got on there,
(04:44):
I would lose hours and hours there's so many different
ways to slice and dice who's looking at your profile,
who's interested in you. You can say you know whether
or not you're interested in them back. You can wink
at someone. She was telling me that the the protocol
with winks is if a guy winks you, then you
(05:04):
can either wink back at him to give him the
go ahead to email you, or you can just take
the reins from that wink and contact him directly, which
just baffles girls. Ever, wink first. I'm sure girls can
wink first. Ladies, please wink first. I hope that's not
you know, the girls can't can't wink first. You can
get someone's phone number. There's a thing to click on
(05:26):
there to get someone's phone number. And uh, and it
was kind of funny going through uh, her profile with
her because she had will send you this list of
everyone who is interested in you, and so she like
opened up her inbox with all the people who are
interested and she just started like clicking through them, like
she was going like gane shopping. He's like no, no, no, maybe,
(05:50):
oh god, no, no, you know, and it was just
it was kind of fascinating. But these were these guys
that the site thought that she would get along with. Yeah,
these were people who you and see I think they
were nineteen attributes that you fill out a lot of, uh,
just physical appearance, uh, lifestyle and habits, political views, whether
or not you're an animal, leveragees general things about you,
(06:12):
and so it will show you, um how well you
match up to someone else in all of those characteristics
and match dot Com I think sends you, um like
their own lists of uh that they've called of people
you might be interested in based on your shared interests.
And then I think people can just randomly, you know,
see your picture and thinks that you're you're you're hottie
(06:33):
and wink wink. But see, this is interesting. This is
where online doing has gotten really high tech lately. Like,
you know, being matched up on the basis of like
do you smoke not smoke? Kind of a basic thing.
But now if you go to some of these sites,
you take you know, very long questionnaires on all sorts
of things that you are, about the essence of you
(06:55):
and to under forty eight questions, and that's what they
used to match you up. It's become very uh high tech.
They're all these secret algorithms and people are trying to
wonder is there real science behind this or is it
just a huge money making scheme, because you can't deny
that money is being made. Uh. According to some recent
data from an investment research firm called Piper Jeffrey, Americans
(07:16):
spent one point to billion on online matching sites in
two thousand eight, and the company's predicting that by are
going to be at one point seven billion. Well, it
sounds all the advertisements do sound pretty appealing. If you
you know a company like let's take e harmony dot
com for instance. I think they're one of one of
the most famous for their secret algorithm that I think
(07:36):
they were going to try to patent at some point UM.
And and the way they derived their algorithm was they
took personality profiles of five thousand married couples and then
they scored their personality types UM and compared that to
their level of reported marital happiness UM according to something
(07:58):
called the die datic Ajustment scale. And then from that
they created these twenty nine core traits and vital attributes
that they supposedly match people by. And I think you
have to go through once you joined it, you you
answer two fifty eight questions that sums up your core
traits and vital attributes, and uh, somehow, you know, magic happens.
(08:22):
You know, one of my friends who used said that
she was willing to use this one because the fact
that you had to spend time answering all those questions
at least proved that the people who are there wanted
to be there. Yeah, you weren't just filling out a
random another profile to add to your repertoire. But at
the same time, I think we do have to mention
that e harmony um has gotten a lot of flak
(08:43):
because this algorithm does not take into account uh, homosexual
people like the they can't actually join the site, and
the Harmony says, well, we just used um only heterosexual
couples in our reas search to derive the algorithms, so
it can't really fit. At the same time, it's definitely
(09:03):
been a big PR problem for them. Yeah, and the
PR problem that it seems like all these companies currently
face on office will change in the future is that
no one since they haven't seen the algorithms, there's no
way for it to be subject to a peer review process.
Other scientists and sociologists, psychologists, all these people who would
know about whether these algorithms work in terms of compatibility
can't get their hands on it to review. But the
(09:25):
only you know, measures of success e Harmony has released
other than the commercials that tell all the weddings that
people are having um is one study that compared happiness
between couples who had met on the site and couples
who hadn't met on the site, and they were concluding
that people who had met on the site were much
happier than the other couples. But they were comparing couples
who have been you know, married for six months versus
(09:47):
two years, and so the couples that have married two
years might have been a little more settled out of
that newly wet phase and as a result, that might
have been why they're reporting less happiness. But and I
also think that the Harmony tried to claim that, uh,
they were responsible for something like two of all of
the weddings that happened in the US, like I think
(10:07):
last year, I think a hundred and twenty weddings a
day or something like that, or the Harmony weddings, which
seems pretty impressive. But Helen Fisher over at Chemistry dot com.
We talked about Helen Fisher in episode UM entitled why
is the Sizzle Fizzle. She she's an anthropologist who studies
kind of the the science of love and UH, and
she's trying to get her formula for chemistry dot com
(10:29):
peer reviewed because what she's done is UM taken psychological
and sociological measures and compared that with the levels of
certain UM chemicals in your brains such as UH, dopamine
and nor pephrin that all contribute to um our behavior
when we are in love. And has UH kind of
broken that out into these uh different personality types, like
(10:55):
I think, UM, there are things like builders and a
lot of a tone in you're a builder, Yeah, if
you have testoster and you're a director, and they're also
explorers and negotiators. And she's basically found that people who
are explorers, tentific explorers, builders choose builders, while it's directors
and negotiators select each other. So you know, she's saying,
I can use these chemicals in the brain to predict
(11:17):
who's going to get along. But like the other sites,
not currently peera viewed, but there have been a lot
of other studies peer viewed studies on online dating behavior
and whether or not it really might work. And you know, Kristen,
when we were researching this, some of the studies I
was most interested in were these studies about whether people
(11:38):
are honest online because this is a pretty big, maybe
mental hurdle for a lot of people. You know, we
already know that when people are online, they feel they
can say and do anything, so naturally, if you're trying
to catch a fella, catch a nice lady, you might lie.
And they're finding that people, yes, do lie. About half
of the men lie about their height, more than sixty
(12:00):
percent of participants skew their weight by five pounds or more.
And you know, then there are always correlations that the
people who are shorter and more out of shape are
more likely to lie. I mean, it seems fairly obvious,
but it does happen. There was one steer that showed
the men are mostly going to be you know, a
little bit deceptive about their income, their height, age, and
troubling le marital status. Yeah, there was one disturbing statistic
(12:24):
about the number of men on on these sides who
are already married ladies. So just to be aware note
of caution, and women were just more likely to lie
about their appearance. But you know, then you've got other
people coming in saying who doesn't lie at the beginning
of a relationship. Yeah. One thing I noticed when I
was reading these match dot Com profiles was they were
(12:45):
all so just, you know, breezy and casual, you know,
everyone like you could just there's always like this boilerplate
statement of you know, I just you know, I'm really
just looking for love, I want to soulmate and just
someone to you know, go to dinner with on a
Tuesday night. I mean just like really just out there,
like very very straightforward at the same time, like you know,
(13:07):
just trying to appear as normal as possible, because that's
the kind of statement that would not seem normal if
a guy came up to at a bar and was like,
looking for love, want to be my soul mate, really
want a soul mate. So, on the one hand, you
have people who can be very honest about what they're
looking for. On the other hand, maybe not so honest
about uh who they are. But at the same time,
(13:28):
how are we evaluating that. Obviously, in the back of
our head we know that each profile we look at
may not be particularly honest, but I was interested by
these things about how people evaluate the profiles, which they
started looking at after they realized that a lot of
people would join these sites and become disenchanted very quickly.
They would you know, quit the site, not go on
any dates. There's one statistic from the New York Times that, um,
(13:51):
you know, people who are looking at profiles only go
on dates with fewer than one percent of the people
whose profiles they look at. And then they often claim
these dates are just appointments. So they started looking at
why this was. A group of researchers from Harvard Business School,
Boston University, and M I. T started looking at all
this online dating behavior and uh. They they found that
(14:12):
people often create unrealistic expectations that are just setting them
up for failure. Because you see this profile of someone,
you know, let's take you say, I'm looking for a
guy I find. You know, he just looks so handsome
and all those photos. He seems very well adjusted, he
has a very nice reading list. I like that he kayaks,
(14:33):
you know, so we finally he winks at me, I
wink at M back, and you know, we have magical
trail of emails and uh, and then we finally go
out on a date, and I built him up so
much in my mind that I'm just kind of doomed
to failure because they were saying that you need to
leave a little mystery to h actually make dating, the
(14:53):
actual person to person process of dating a little more exciting.
It's like, we put so much information out there, it's
just not as much of a fun game. And if
you're pre judging that information they found, you know, they
gave online data to a list of attributes, some of
which they felt described them as well and some of
which didn't. And if the first attribute that they stuck
(15:15):
up there didn't jive with the person who saw it,
they were much more likely to negatively judge all the
adjectives that followed, even if all the other adjectives and
qualities that followed were exactly what they were looking for.
As soon as they spotted that one flaw, they're like, nope,
out of here, next one. Yeah, it's just a domino
effect until you just it's like my friend but who
(15:35):
was just like clicking through she would see an attribute
she didn't like, and it was just like done, done, done.
And some people think that this is this is a problem,
this is creating just kind of a throwaway culture. Um,
we already have a divorce rate, and this kind of
behavior is only going to intensify that. There was an
article in Scientific American UM by Robert Epstein and he
(15:56):
was referring to this as the click problem. I thought
it was he was concerned to the fact that not only, um,
are you kind of dating in a socially isolated environment
because you're sitting in front of a computer, but you're
also given all these options that you can just you know,
toss people away with a click. Yeah, as soon as
you as soon as you're done, you're out of there.
(16:17):
And you know, it seems like there are all these
other fish in the see. But you can become overwhelmed
by that much choice is another thing that people are saying, Um,
you know you just read and read these profiles and
you never actually follow up on them. Yeah. There was
UM one study that was discussed in UM Technology Review
from M. I. T. And it was saying that, uh,
you have so many choices that users experience something called
(16:40):
cognitive overload. It's like you just you can't even make
a good decision because you have so many choices in
front of you. And I think that probably what what
part of this might stem from is that we do
hear all these success stories like your friend, UM, I
have friends like this, So we we hear these success stories.
And I think once you make that, men to herdle
and say Okay, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna go
(17:02):
online and date, and when it doesn't happen as easily
as you know it seems like it happens for your friends,
become very frustrated very quickly, right because you think that
the biggest benefit of online dating is that you can
just you know, you can just cut to the chase.
You can find that guy who has your you know,
the list of attributes that you want, and you guys
can meet, you can fall in love and it's going
to be magical. But there was one point raised by
(17:24):
UM a psychologist named Eli Finkel at Northwestern University, and
he was saying that we might be making impossible shopping
lists for a mate because we now have the ability to,
you know, try to like hone in on what we
think is going to be the perfect person. When when
it boils right down to it, sometimes you know, you
really can't explain love. You can't boil love down to
(17:47):
two fifty eight questions despite all our attempts to explain
love on podcasts. Uh So, I think the really the
takeaway is that online dating can work. I mean, you
have to stick with it just as long as you
would stick with real life you know, in real life dating. Right.
That was all that was one of the conclusions from
one of these studies. It was just that the rules
of online dating and real life dating are the same.
(18:07):
You just have to have in front different form of communication.
Kiss your frogs, wait for your prince or princess, wait
for your wings. But while you are waiting for those wings,
if you do have a you know, a lull. One
one good thing to do to take up some time
is read. Are we gonna do reading? We are fans
of reading here at stuff Mom never told you, And
(18:28):
now you guys have been sending in your reading lists
per our request. Thank you very much, And so I
am going to read Sheila in Virginia Beaches reading list.
She has split her summer reading into three sections, which
I'm very impressed with. Sheila. For social studies, she's reading
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Bonk by Mary Roach, and the
(18:50):
Mirror Effect by Drew Pinski and s. Martin Young, and
then an Undead fiction. She is reading Pride and Prejudice
in Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Graham Smith. She's
reading Breathers, a Zombies Lament by S. G. Brown, and
then she's reading blood Sucking Fiends by Christopher Moore. And
then finally the third section is soccer. She's gonna read
(19:12):
The Beckham Experiment by Grant Wall Finn mccool's Football Club
by Stephen ray An Outcasts United by Warren st. John.
Very interesting. That's about UH soccer team not too far
from here in Atlanta, refugees. I'm interesting. I'm interested in
that book as well. Yeah, So if you got any
reading list you want to send us, or if you
have any thoughts on online dating, any success stories, horror stories,
(19:35):
Molly and I would love to hear them, so you
should send us an email at mom stuff at how
stuff works dot com. And as always, you can check
out our blog called how to stuff. And if you
want to learn more about UH finding love and the
chemistry of love and how kissing works and all of that,
you should just head on over to how stuff Works
(19:57):
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how staff works dot com. Brought to you by
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