psychology

And Other Notes on Online Dating

If you’re coming across this post sometime between checking your morning email and logging into your favorite online dating apps, then this piece is for you. And with nearly 22% of straight couples and 70% of gay and lesbian couples meeting online, you’re in good company.

Using findings from their recent book collaboration, Modern Romance, sociologist Eric Klinenberg and comedian Aziz Ansari offer their advice for navigating the demanding, and often confusing, world of online dating. Among their findings highlighted in a New York Times op-ed, they learned that certain profile pictures are more successful for landing dates than others. Women baring cleavage in a flirty selfie, unsurprisingly, have high success rates, but strangely, so do men holding animals while looking away from the camera with serious facial expressions.

With all those cleavage-filled, serious pet owner profile pictures, the fast-paced world of online dating often allows users to either exclude a potential date too quickly or feel overwhelmed by perceived options. Klinenberg and Ansari reference several psychology studies to explain indecisiveness among online daters, but clear things up with a rap analogy:

Think about it in terms of pop music. When a new song featuring Drake comes on the radio, you’re like, “What is this song? Oh another Drake song. Big deal. Heard this before. Next please!”

Ideally, they argue, “you keep hearing it and you think, ‘Oh Drake, you’ve done it again!’” In non-Drake terms: online dating works a lot better if users are patient and get to know one another instead of being quick to dismiss based on photos of superficial profile information. So before you swipe from profile to profile, consider forgoing the comfort of your couch and instead meet someone in person for a better chance of establishing a real connection.

When you’re regularly “weird,” you get used to others’ asking you to “just be reasonable.” However, a new trend in sociological approaches to economics and psychology suggests that our version of “reasonable” may be, well, pretty weird.

In a recent article for Pacific Standard, Ethan Watters reviews the work of Joe Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, three scholars whose work on the western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic mind suggests that “rational” thought means very different things to different people. As the authors watched games based on economic exchange play out around the world, the concept of getting a fair deal seemed to have everything to do with social context:

The distinct ways Americans and Machiguengans [indigenous Amazonians] played the ultimatum game, for instance, wasn’t because they had differently evolved brains. Rather, Americans, without fully realizing it, were manifesting a psychological tendency shared with people in other industrialized countries… Our economies hadn’t been shaped by our sense of fairness; it was the other way around.

Stranger still, it seems this assumption that the weird mind is normal has a huge impact on the practice of psychological research—not to mention our understanding of rationality in the social world.:

A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals dramatically shows how common that assumption was: …96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the world’s population.

Westerners (and Americans in particular) tend to reason analytically as opposed to holistically. That is, the American mind strives to figure out the world by taking it apart and examining its pieces.

And here is the rub: the culturally shaped analytic/individualistic mind-sets may partly explain why Western researchers have so dramatically failed to take into account the interplay between culture and cognition. In the end, the goal of boiling down human psychology to hardwiring is not surprising given the type of mind that has been designing the studies.

Who’s weird now? Probably everyone.