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: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Tuesday September 06 2016, @11:09AM
It's fairly typical for selection to be important with a small pool and deselection be important with a large pool, irrespective of the target. When you have a large pool of possibilities, your priority is to narrow it down to a small pool. If your relationship prospects are limited to the people roughly your age in your village, for example, then you're going to be looking at the positives and trying to find the best overall from that narrow set. When confronted with 10,000 singles in your area and a database system, your first priority is to eliminate the obvious rejects and then move on to refining.
Exactly the same thing happens with jobs and university admissions. For example, HR does a first pass to weed out the obviously unqualified and then passes on the rest for more detailed examination.
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