Posted September 30, Reviewed by Gary Drevitch. Increasing numbers of us are seeking partners using mobile dating apps. Tinder, the most popular app, has upwards of 50 millions users worldwide. Relationship scientists, who have spent decades studying how people pair up, have begun wondering whether dating apps like Tinder might be changing what we seek in a partner.
That is, to end up with partners whom they match on certain characteristics, such as age, attractiveness , and personality. There are reasons to suspect we might not. We are less likely to meet people who are different to us than people who are similar to us. And we can only enter relationships with people we meet. Do we take advantage of this greater opportunity, or do we match as much as we did in those pre-Tinder days?
They recruited volunteers over the internet to try out their fake version of Tinder. The reason the scientists developed a fake Tinder was so they could collect extra data from their volunteers. Otherwise, the app worked much the same way as the real thing. A left swipe indicates no interest in a profile. Personality psychologists think of personality as made up of five components: extraversion , agreeableness , conscientiousness , emotional stability , and openness to experience.
The volunteers rated how high and low each profile appeared to be on these five traits. Afterward, the volunteers indicated their own age, and rated their own attractiveness and personality. Did the volunteers prefer profiles of people they were similar to?
Volunteers did match with people similar in age. Personality was less important than age, but the volunteers also tended to prefer profiles they matched in agreeableness and openness to experience. Perhaps surprisingly, there was no matching for extraversion or for conscientiousness and emotional stability.
