Lies, damn lies, and dating apps
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/05/03
The Daily Mail reported on something interesting. Not the fact of people lying to attract mates, that seems inevitable. Human beings lie to date or attract a mate to a date.
Based on reportage of a Stanford University study, they found the most common lies on dating apps. People falsify availability to “deceive potential partners.”
The most common lies were “butler lies.” They are 3/10ths of the lies. With 200 participants and 3,000 messages, the lies centered on relationships rather than starting them.
The situation before some of this research was ambiguous about the types of lying. Now, the vice of lying can be cut into bits via parsing of dating app data.
On the whole, people are honest. 2/3rds of people never lie. 7% were deceptive for sure. The majority of lies were “availability and exaggerating personal interests in an effort to appear more attractive.”
People lie about who they’re with and what they do. Other research has shown men lie about income and height; women lie about age and beauty.
Hancock calls the butler lies the ones that are meant to be polite into to conceal something. That prevents some unwanted social interactions.
30% of lies were white lies.
“One participant messaged, ‘Hey I’m so so sorry, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it today. My sister just called and I guess she’s on her way here now. I’d be up for a raincheck if you wanted, though. Sorry again.’”
People tend to be honest, about 66% of the time or 66% of people are, surprisingly, honest and frank in a respectful way. Others not so much, but only to politely avoid some interaction.
The first dating app came from 1995 with Match.com. Single people could give an image and then converse with people. This was purported to help with long-term relationship development.
eHarmony came online around 2000, and 2002 for Ashley Madison for those wanting to cheat on their spouses.
Others include “OKCupid (2004), Plenty of Fish (2006), Grindr (2009) and Happn (2013)” and “Tinder [2012].” Tinder was the first one with a swipe option as the main means for selection of a potential short-term partner — i.e., someone to sleep with.
“After its initial launch it’s usage snowballed and by March 2014 there were one billion matches a day, worldwide,” the Daily Mail reported, “In 2014, co-founder of Tinder, Whitney Wolfe Herd launched Bumble, a dating app that empowered women by only allowing females to send the first message.”
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