As a platform for meeting people, online dating has been growing in popularity. As the dating sites were growing, there wasn't a lot of easily available data on the people who used them to draw many conclusions from a sociological standpoint, but now that the numbers of people who use these sites is in the tens of millions, that is changing. When looking at the balance between choosing traits that make for a good relationship match verses eliminating people based upon negative attributes, aka "deal breakers", it appears people predominately employ the latter strategy.
A group of sociologists from the University of Michigan led by Elizabeth Bruch obtained data from one of the large dating sites and they looked at a randomly-selected group of people from New York City to determine what factors in their decision-making process led them to select or eliminate potential mates.
Bruch and her team divided the rules into two broad categories, "deal breakers" and "deal makers," used to exclude or include people for the next level of contact. Bruch wondered: Is mate selection like a job interview process, where the person with the best combination of positive factors wins? Or is it more like a Survivor-style reality show, where contestants are picked off one by one for a single failing?
Among the deal breakers are:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 06 2016, @04:32AM
Not really, or at least not in a way commonly understood.
The biggest deal breaker is geographic location. In a sense mass media has complicated this a bit. You are no longer judging beauty by the prettiest person in town, but the prettiest worldwide and lower your expectations accordingly. Similarly with nearly any other type of criteria. All decisions are bound by predominately by local, but the selection is worldwide.
Not to mention there are attributes that mitigate several dealbreakers (wealth, prestige, superhuman tolerance for pain, etc.) that don't seem to be accounted for in the study.