At this time and age it is most likely you have heard of dating apps, at least in passing, if you have not already tried them out yourself. In theory, this sounds like an easy way to find a suitable partner. It is interesting to take a look at what draws us to dating apps in the first place. In a study by Sumter, Vandenbosch and Ligtenberg , researchers took a closer look at what motivates us to use dating apps.
They found that users have a variety of motivations when engaging with these apps, including love, casual sex, and self-worth validation. It is with this last motivation that users may find that dating apps can lead to psychological distress and anxiety. As demonstrated by Holtzhausen et al. So why do we keep coming back to them? The reason may lie in the way that these apps are designed. The simple swiping motion opens the door to countless possible matches, giving the feeling of instant reward.
In order to reinforce swiping behaviour, dating apps make use of intermittent reinforcement. Just like a slot machine, dating apps aid themselves by presenting users with randomly placed reinforcers β a match. This form of reinforcement has been shown to work best when shaping new behaviours, since it produces longer-lasting habits DeRusso et al.
The idea being that the learner does not know when the reinforcement will appear. In the case of the slot machine, one can pull on the lever countless times before getting a reward. But simply knowing that the possibility of a reward exists makes one continue to pull on the lever since the next pull could be a jackpot. In a similar way, dating apps encourage their users to keep swiping in the hope that the next profile may be the love of their life.
We can take this behavioural analysis a step further by looking more closely at what happens inside our brains when we engage with dating apps. Dopamine fires when we are faced with the opportunity to receive a reward, incentivising us to repeat behaviours that have previously rewarded us. In the case of dating apps, dopamine fires whenever you get a match.
