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SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday September 06 2016, @03:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the sounds-like-real-life dept.

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:

  • No profile photo: Men and women were 20 times less likely to look at this profile.
  • Smoker: A 10-fold drop in interest.
  • Age difference: Young women (20 yo) were 10X less likely to look at a profile of a man ten years older than her, older women (45 yo) were 10% more likely to consider a man ten years older than her, and men overall preferred women younger than them.
  • Height difference: Women were 10X more likely to look at a profile of a guy 17 cm (6 in) taller than her while guys were 3X more likely to look a the profile of a woman 17cm shorter than him
  • Body weight: Men were less likely to view a profile of a heavy-set woman while women showed no aversion to a heavy-set guy.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 06 2016, @12:37PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 06 2016, @12:37PM (#398067)

    Bringing it on topic, there's people who confuse dating people they met online with dating people they met in online dating forums and I bet the stats are different.

    Like in the example above, the webmaster of "raisegoatsinyerbackyard.com" did not realize he was operating a dating website.

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