Archive for the ‘Free Dating Websites’ Category
The Truth about Dating Websites
Regarding the effectiveness of dating websites… Criteria for establishing test reliability are quite rigorous. Once relevant data are collected, the results are typically submitted to the scientific community for scrutiny. A peer-reviewed report (one vetted by other knowledgeable researchers in the field) is ultimately published in an academic journal.
Several online services are now built entirely around claims that they have powerful, effective, “scientific” matchmaking tests–most notably eHarmony.com, promoted by clinical psychologist Neil Warren; PerfectMatch.com, promoted by sociologist Pepper Schwartz of the University of Washington; and Chemistry.com (a recent spin-off of Match.com), promoted by anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers. But not one of the tests they offer has ever been subjected to the type of outside scientific verification that I have described.
Why would a major company such as eHarmony, which claims to have 12 million members, not subject its “scientific, 29-dimension” test to a scientific validation process? In 2004 eHarmony personnel did present a paper at a national convention claiming that married couples who met through eHarmony were happier than couples who met by other means. Typically such a paper would then be submitted for possible publication in a peer-reviewed journal. But this paper has still not been published, possibly because of its obvious flaws–the most problematic being that the eHarmony couples in the study were newlyweds (married an average of six months), whereas the couples in the control group (who had met by other means) were way past the honeymoon period (married an average of 2.1 years). (eHarmony personnel, including its founder, Neil Warren, did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.)
In 2005, using eHarmony’s own published statistics, a team of credible authorities–among them Philip Zimbardo, a former president of the American Psychological Association–concluded in an online white paper: “When eHarmony recommends someone as a compatible match, there is a 1 in 500 chance that you’ll marry this person…. Given that eHarmony delivers about 1.5 matches a month, if you went on a date with all of them, it would take 346 dates and 19 years to reach [a] 50% chance of getting married.” The team also made the sweeping observation that “there is no evidence that … scientific psychology is able to pair individuals who will enjoy happy, lasting marriages.”
Think about how difficult this task is. Most online matching is done, for example, by pairing up people who are “similar” in various respects. But you do not need to look farther than your own family and friends to know that similarity is not always a good predictor of success in a relationship. Sometimes opposites really do attract. How could an online test possibly determine whether you should be paired with someone similar or with someone different, or with some magic mix?
And even if validated predictive tests eventually appeared online, how could such tests possibly predict how two people will feel when they finally meet–when that all-important “chemistry” comes into play? Oddly enough, eHarmony does not even ask people about their body type, even though research shows unequivocally that physical appearance is important to both men and women.
But the biggest problem with online testing is the “false negative problem.” A test that determines in advance whom you might meet and whom you will never meet necessarily fails to allow certain people to meet who would adore each other. The good news, though, is that according to psychologist Larry D. Rosen of California State University, Dominguez Hills, “In our studies only 30 percent of the people say they use [online tests] at all, and most of those people find them ridiculous.”
High Hopes and Poor Odds
Advertising materials from the largest online dating services–Match, eHarmony, True.com and Yahoo! Personals–suggest that more than 50 million Americans are now using such services (assuming relatively little overlap in membership) and that satisfaction levels are high. But recent independent studies suggest that only 16 million Americans were using online dating services by late 2005 and that satisfaction levels were low. Based on a phone survey with more than 2,000 people, Jupiter Research reports that “barely one quarter of users reported being very satisfied or satisfied with online personals sites.” Another extensive survey conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Projects suggests that 66 percent of Internet users think that online dating websites is a “dangerous activity.”
