Why We Should Meet Our Matches Offline, ASAP
Think about your first messages on dating apps. Do you send more first messages to people you perceive as more attractive than yourself, or to people you perceive as less attractive than yourself? Most people do the former, but it may be better for you to try the latter.
Stick with me as I explain a bit about social comparison theory and the results of this 2018 study analyzing the aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating.
Online and Offline Judgements — Different Inputs, Same process
In dating, like any social comparison, we as humans are quite good at “feeling” where we rank in competitiveness. This is part of our evolutionary drive to be social and fit into social hierarchies. We gather information about another individual through our senses and can make an instant judgment about whether or not they are “in our league.” Of course, people are far more nuanced and complex than the simplified versions we judge, but the reality is we only have so much time to explore these complexities and thus rely on our biased judgments to do the initial filtering.
When you encounter a potential partner through friends or at a bar, you make an immediate judgment just by looking at them before you decide if you’ll give a flirtatious conversation a chance. After an hour of talking you can confidently decide if you’d be willing to go on a date or if you’re better off pursuing a different type of relationship (or nothing at all).
Conversely, when you encounter a potential partner on a dating app, you make an immediate judgment by looking at their profile before you decide if you’ll give messaging a chance. After some messages, you try and decide if you’re willing to go on a physical date.
These situations are similar but significantly different. Online dating is built to mimic the judgment process in real life, but faster, more convenient, and with more options. Online dating is great for these things, but the tradeoff is that it doesn’t give the full picture. This is obvious. You know seeing someone’s profile and messaging online is never the same as meeting them in person.
The above study reveals that even though people are aware of the differences between online dating and meeting someone in real life, their mind still treats it the same. We know someone’s pictures, bio, and messages do not represent them totally, and yet our brains form a pretty solid judgment about the person solely from this information. We don’t have all the information, but we make decisions as if we do. Why? Because humans are really bad about realizing what is not in front of us. We don’t see what is missing, but that is where the magic is.
Humans are Ambitious but Realistic
The study focuses on how people of different desirability rankings interact on the platform. It took thousands of first-messages sent from four major US cities throughout a month and used an algorithm similar to page rank to decide which users were most “desirable” (Inactive Homosexual/Bisexual users were excluded to preserve the accuracy of the results). In the same way that websites with the most links from the most high-ranking other websites have the highest rank on Google, users who received the most messages from the most “desirable” other users had the highest rank in this study.
The study’s findings are absolutely consistent with social comparison theory. People accurately perceive their own and others’ desirabilities on the platform and most commonly pursue others near their own desirability level. However, the results are skewed. On average, people pursue others who are 25% more desirable than themselves, and hardly anyone pursues another who is significantly less desirable than themselves.
The farther a user reaches up the desirability ladder, the smaller the chances for getting a reply becomes.
Worse still, the study shows that those who reach farthest on the desirability ladder tend to never reach below (whereas the majority of people reach above and slightly below). This over-ambitious strategy leaves people completely empty-handed, but the average, moderately ambitious strategy doesn’t do too much better.
“Quality vs. Quantity”
In response to diminishing returns, people change their strategy. One strategy may maximize quality: being very selective about who you message and putting a lot of effort into the message itself to increase chance of reply. Another may maximize quantity: glancing at a profile pictures, sending a ton of quick, thoughtless first-messages, and waiting for a response to further decide about one’s interest.
The study shows evidence of both strategies being predominant: the higher a given user reached up the desirability ladder, the more likely they were to send fewer, but longer and more positive, first messages. Unfortunately, it also provides evidence that the length and positivity of messages has very little significant effect on getting a response.
Thus, neither of these extreme strategies is best for online dating.
The most accurate predictor of getting a response is the desirability gap between the sender and the receiver. According to the study, messaging someone even slightly lower on the ladder can more than double the chances of a response.
Losing Online to Win Offline
Your best bet on setting up dates is to send messages to matches you perceive as slightly below your league. “But I don’t want to meet someone less desirable than me. I’d rather pursue the perfect match.” Agreed, assuming you have perfect information on how desirable the person really is to you. But you don’t. Because your perception is only of their online presence, which we’ve already established is quite different from real life. The good news is you can get that information by meeting with them, in real life, for as little as one hour.
Don’t expect a 1 to turn into a 10, but realize that there are so many desirable (or undesirable) nuances you won’t realize until you’re physically there: their gestures, their voice, their attitude, their attentiveness, or even their smell. The room for error between what you perceive online and what you perceive in person is significant enough that you may want to consider how selective you are. The time you spend finding and messaging highly desirable people online could be spent realizing the true desirability of someone offline who has already sent you a message.
The difference between the person’s perceived online desirability and their real-life desirability is a function of how well the dating platform and the person’s profile mimics the real world and their true self.
So how well does the dating platform you use mimic reality? Probably not so well. In fact, we have evidence to prove that dating platforms are almost exclusively visually-driven. So message those 4s and 5s and get out there to meet someone, just maybe don’t mention this strategy 😉.
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NEXT UP: Why We Swipe The Wrong Way
Citation:
Bruch, E. E., & Newman, M. E. J. (2018). Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets. Science Advances, 4(8), eaap9815.
