Dating Web Sites Info

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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.”

What about adult dating websites and profiles?

If you are a Garrison Keillor fan, you have probably heard about the fictional Lake Wobegon on National Public Radio, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” In the online dating community, similar rules apply: in one study, only 1 percent of online daters listed their appearance as “less than average.”

Rationale for Falsehoods
Why so much inaccuracy? One theory, formulated in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Sara Kiesler and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, suggests that by its very nature “computer-mediated communication” is disinhibiting, causing people to say just about anything they feel like saying. Because people typically use screen names rather than real ones, their ramblings are anonymous and hence not subject to social norms. There are also no physical cues or consequences–no visible communication gestures, raised eyebrows, grimaces, and so on–to keep people’s behavior in check. As a result, online daters tend to construct what Ellison and her colleagues Jennifer Gibbs of Rutgers University and Rebecca Heino of Georgetown University call an “ideal self” rather than a real one. A study published recently by Ellison and her colleagues even suggests that online daters often regret it when they do tell the truth, feeling that too much honesty, especially about negative attributes, creates a bad impression.

There are also straightforward, practical reasons for lying. One recent study showed that men claiming incomes exceeding $250,000 got 151 percent more replies than men claiming ?incomes less than $50,000, for example. Many women are quite open about listing much younger ages, often stating in the text of their profiles that they have listed a younger age to make sure they turn up in searches. (Because men often use age cutoffs in their searches, women who list ages above that cutoff will never be seen.)

My research assistant Rachel Greenberg and I have examined the age issue by plotting a histogram of the ages of 1,000 men and 1,000 women selected at random from the national database of Match.com, arguably now the largest of the online matchmaking services. We speculated that from age 29 on–the point at which people in our culture tend to become sensitive about growing older–we might see some distinctive patterns in the distribution of ages. For men, a small spike appeared in the ?distribution at 32 and a large one at 36. The number of men calling themselves 36 was dramatically higher than the average frequency of men between the ages of 37 and 41.

For women, we found three clear age spikes at 29, 35 and 44. The difference between the number of women claming to be 29 and the average frequency of women claiming to be between ages 30 and 34 was nearly eight times larger than we would expect by chance. Apparently women at certain ages are reluctant to reveal those ages–and certain numerical ages are especially appealing, presumably because our culture attaches less stigma to those ages.

Tests That Fail
I have been a researcher for about 30 years and a test designer for nearly half those years. When I see extravagant ads for online tests that promise to find people a soul mate, I find myself asking, “How on earth could such a test exist?”

The truth is, it doesn’t.

For a psychometric evaluation to be taken seriously by scientists, the test itself needs to clear two hurdles. It needs to be shown to be reliable–which means, roughly, that you can count on it to produce stable results. And it needs to be shown to be a valid measure of what it is supposed to be measuring. With a test that matches people up, such validity would be established by showing that the resulting romantic pairings are actually successful.