Science Shows Dating Websites Aren?t Better At Finding You Love

I was really hoping this article would have ended differently. But after spending countless hours scanning tiny pixelated squares of people who were supposed to represent my mathematically determined soul mate, I found that online dating websites are modern-day versions of snake oil. I ended up back at bachelorhood after a long and expensive trek through computer-aided love services; I decided to look for love on the Internet mainly to test the hypothesis behind a blistering 50-page critique?of?hyped up promise of dating websites. “The heavy emphasis on profile browsing at most dating sites has considerable downsides, and there is little reason to believe that current compatibility algorithms are especially effective,” explained the team behind an article published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. “You do know that the American public has gotten hoodwinked since there was a product to be sold,” cautioned Professor Thomas Bradbury, in a more strident retelling of his research to LA Weekly. In essence, the researchers had ripped apart the unscientific claims of dating websites with three compelling arguments 1) no one knows the recipe for love, so a man-made algorithm can’t fare any better 2) scanning profiles leads us to select on superficial traits, and 3) online communicating is a really bad way to start off a love affair. I hoped they were wrong. Impossible Claims From Algorithms “We might compare the understanding and prediction of romantic outcomes to attempts to understand and predict the stock market,” the research asserted. “Although economists know a great deal about how the stock market behaves and why, attempts to predict the behavior of the market at a specific point in the future have limited accuracy.” If you think about it, dating sites basically claim to predict the future, arguing that they have a crystal ball with a higher probability of users ending up in romantic utopia. It’s a funny assumption, because even the bleeding edge of social science, which arguably has access to a lot more accurate data than eHarmony, is really quite bad at predicting human behavior. The normally poor state of social forecasting is compounded by the fact that individuals, in general, are terrible at knowing what they want in a significant other. Per the researchers,”people?s idiosyncratic self-reported preferences for certain characteristics in hypothetical romantic partners appear to be irrelevant to their romantic outcomes with specific potential partners they have actually met in person.” Another

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