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Title: Love, lies and the science of online dating
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URL Source: http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Lo ... line+dating/5713291/story.html
Published: Nov 16, 2011
Author: Stephanie Rosenbloom, New York Times
Post Date: 2011-11-16 01:15:27 by Tatarewicz
Keywords: None
Views: 202
Comments: 18
Of the romantic partnerships formed in the U.S. between 2007 and 2009, 21 per cent of heterosexual couples and 61 per cent of samesex couples met online, according to a study by Michael J. Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford. Of the romantic partnerships formed in the U.S. between 2007 and 2009, 21 per cent of heterosexual couples and 61 per cent of samesex couples met online, according to a study by Michael J. Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford. There are millions of North Americans seeking love on the Internet. Little do they know that teams of scientists are eagerly watching them trying to find it. Like contemporary Margaret Meads, these scholars have gathered data from dating sites like http://Match.com, OkCupid and Yahoo! Personals to study attraction, trust, deception -- even the role of race and politics in prospective romance. They have observed, for instance, that many daters would rather admit to being fat than liberal or conservative, that white people are reluctant to date outside their race and that there are ways to detect liars. Such findings spring from attempts to answer a broader question that has bedevilled humanity since Adam and Eve: How and why do people fall in love? "There is relatively little data on dating, and most of what was out there in the literature about mate selection and relationship formation is based on U.S. census data," said Gerald Mendelsohn, a professor in the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research involving more than one million online dating profiles was partly financed by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation. "This now gives an access to dating that we never really had before," he said. (Collectively, the major dating sites had more than 593 million visits in the U.S. last month, according to the Internet tracking firm Experian Hitwise.) Andrew Fiore, a data scientist at Facebook and a former visiting assistant professor at Michigan State University, said that unlike lab studies, "online dating provides an ecologically valid or true-to-life context for examining the risks, uncertainties and rewards of initiating real relationships with real people at an unprecedented scale." "As more and more of life happens online, it's less and less the case that online is a vacuum," he added. "It is life." Of the romantic partnerships formed in the U.S. between 2007 and 2009, 21 per cent of heterosexual couples and 61 per cent of samesex couples met online, according to a study by Michael J. Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford. (Scholars said that most studies using online dating data are about heterosexuals, because they make up more of the population.) Dating sites and academics have got cosy before; the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers, for example, is http://Chemistry.com's chief scientific adviser, and she helped develop the site, a sister site to Match. com. But scholars are also pursuing academic research using anonymous profile content given to them as a professional courtesy by dating sites. Often the researchers supplement that with surveys and inperson interviews by recruiting online daters through ads on campuses, in newspapers and on websites like Craigslist. Here's some of what they have learned, including maxims for singles: why opposites don't attract and honesty is not always the best policy. Truthiness Do online daters have a propensity to lie? Do we really need scientists to answer this question? If you are curious about numbers: About 81 per cent of people misrepresent their height, weight or age in their profiles, according to a study led by Catalina Toma, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wanted to learn more about how people pres-ent themselves and how they judge misrepresentation. On the bright side: People tend to tell small lies because, after all, they may eventually meet in person. Toma; Jeffrey Hancock, an associate professor at Cornell; and Nicole Ellison, an associate professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University, interviewed online daters in New York City, weighed and measured them, photographed them, checked their ages against their driver's licences and studied their dating profiles. On average, the women described themselves as 8.5 pounds thinner in their profiles than they really were. Men fibbed by two pounds, though they lied by a greater magnitude than women about their height, rounding up a half inch (apparently every bit counts). People were most honest about their age, something Toma said is probably because they can claim ignorance about weight and height. Even so, in a different study she found that women's profile photographs were on average a year and a half old. Men's were on average six months old. "Daters lie to meet the expectations of what they think their audience is," Toma said. Guess who's not coming to dinner? "Stick to your own kind," goes the West Side Story refrain, a phenomenon that sociologists call homophily: love of the same. And they have observed this among online daters. But here is what they did not expect to discover: a very high rate of sameethnicity dating. "One of the theories of how the Internet might affect dating is that it might erode the tendency of people to mate with people like themselves," said Rosenfeld of Stanford. "I really expected there to be more interracial relationships for meeting online. And it wasn't true." Research on a major dating site between February 2009 and February 2010 by Mendelsohn and his colleagues shows that more than 80 per cent of the contacts initiated by white members were to other white members, and only three per cent to black members. Black members were less rigid: They were 10 times more likely to contact whites than whites were to contact blacks. "What you've got is basically the reluctance of white Americans to date and to contact members of other ethnicities, particularly African-Americans," he said. "We are nowhere near the post-racial age." He said, she said Gender parity, it seems, isn't sexy. Women want men who are - wait for it - tall and wealthy, according to online dating research by Gunter Hitsch and Ali Hortacsu at the University of Chicago, and Dan Ariely of Duke. The researchers have examined thousands of dating profiles that included height, weight and, in many cases, photographs. They found that women prefer men who are slightly overweight, while men prefer women who are slightly underweight and who do not tower over them. These were the women who had the best chance of receiving an introductory email from a man. And even though men may get away with carrying a few extra pounds, they are also burdened with the expectation of carrying a fatter wallet: The scholars found that women have a stronger preference than men do for income over physical attributes. Strange bedfellows Decades of findings about political ideology suggest it is in part passed from parents to children, said Rose McDermott, a professor of political science at Brown University. And because previous studies show that people in long marriages align politically (the crackling U.S. example of James Carville and Mary Matalin aside), she wanted to study how people end up with like-minded mates. McDermott and colleagues at the University of Miami and Penn State examined 2,944 dating profiles, and few people were willing to express a political preference or interest in politics. McDermott suspects that this is because they wanted to attract as many dates as possible. But though it could make for an interesting campaign year, such daters could be making a mistake if they are seeking long-term partners. "I was personally really shocked," said McDermott, whose study was published this year in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. "People were much more likely to say 'I'm fat' than 'I'm a conservative.' " © Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal Read more: http://www.edmontonjournal.com/l.../story.html#ixzz1dqSsnuYl Poster Comment: few people were willing to express a political preference or interest in politics. And some folks wonder why it is so easy for Jews to control national politics in America.
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#1. To: Tatarewicz (#0)
Each time I try to copy a text I wish to quote, 4um freezes up on me and I have to exit via the task manager. Anyone else having this problem?
It is vital to understand that there is no truth without discernment and no wisdom without the truth. What then is “faith” but an effort to confound truth and wisdom?
no, i never had that problem. Regarding this story though, i'd warn people meeting online to always, always, get a full body pic (recent) before meeting in person. Word to the wise. lol!
"Even to the death fight for truth, and the LORD your God will battle for you". Sirach 4:28
You left click and drag the cursor down to he bottom line you want to copy (blue-shaded)? Then right click and click "copy"? You can also move this to wordpad where you can kept adding more items to make a complete posting. But here you have to put < p > between paragraphs (but as one word, no space on either side of the p).
Interesting. I don't recall the source, but I read somewhere that a match in the area of politics and 'odor' were the two most important determining factors in a successful relationship.
I've read they were politics and porn. Pagan worship primarily concerns propitiation. In other words, they are religions based on pure fear rather than repentance, contract, or submission -- Vox Day
I would agree with that. Studies have been done especially with women who seem to have better noses, that they can spot the scent of their partner and like it. Smell tends also to be the sense that most easily evokes memories and emotions.
I am on match.com and I am not afraid to say I am ultra-conservative. I am truthful about everything on my profile except my age. Overall I do much better off match than I do on it. Meeting people in person first will always be better for a lasting relationship.
God is always good!
That has nothing to do with the forum, that is your browser and/or OS messed up. You might have a virus. What browser and OS do you use?
God is always good!
I'm on Match.com and a sex-hookup site. I am brutally honest on both. Probably costs me some potential mates, but I prefer to be honest.
#2. To: angK (#1)
#3. To: angK (#1)
#4. To: Tatarewicz (#0)
few people were willing to express a political preference or interest in politics.
#5. To: Lysander_Spooner (#4)
that a match in the area of politics and 'odor'
#6. To: Lysander_Spooner (#4)
#7. To: Tatarewicz (#0)
#8. To: angK (#1)
#9. To: Tatarewicz (#0)
On Match, women seem to be looking for a sugar-daddy and/or have high expectations of the kind of man they want.
On the hookup site, many women are looking for a relationship not just sex. It's rare to find a woman who just wants to fuck. Some are just cock-teases.
Anyone offended by this post, click here.
 | "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." -Albert Camus. |
#10. To: Turtle (#5)
That's pron, don't ya' know :)
#11. To: RickyJ (#8)
Windows XP Home Edition Firefox 8 I'm going to run a Norton scan. I may have picked up a virus downloading a free screen saver. Thanks for the tip.
It is vital to understand that there is no truth without discernment and no wisdom without the truth. What then is “faith” but an effort to confound truth and wisdom?
#12. To: Tatarewicz (#3)
Thanks Tatarewicz. I do know how to copy and paste and know about adding paragraphs, it's just that my copy and paste function is not working. RickyJ thinks I have a virus. However, I don't have a clue about moving the copied text to wordpad. I don't even know how to bring wordpad up on my computer. ??? You can also move this to wordpad.........
It is vital to understand that there is no truth without discernment and no wisdom without the truth. What then is “faith” but an effort to confound truth and wisdom?
#13. To: angK (#12)
My XP Home calls it Notepad - a very basic word processing program. Good luck with it.
Break the Conventions - Keep the Commandments - G.K.Chesterson
#14. To: Lod (#13)
Yup, I found that, and I'll play with it now! Thanks Notepad
It is vital to understand that there is no truth without discernment and no wisdom without the truth. What then is “faith” but an effort to confound truth and wisdom?
#15. To: angK (#12)
If you have been making "anti-Semetic" comments then you should have a pretty good idea who planted the virus. When I make some revealing comments about Organized Jewry's criminality, my keyboard stops working, 4um won't come up. Could be mechanical co-incidence because return to normal after change keyboard, etc. RickyJ thinks I have a virus.
#16. To: Tatarewicz (#15) (Edited)
*Who hasn't been making anti-Semitic comments, LOL. For a while there even Norton would not come up to do a scan, so I removed Norton and downloaded Kapersky. It's doing a scan right now, but low & behold, meanwhile, after a few bucks spent, my copy function has returned as if by magic. * Except for Shoonra If you have been making "anti-Semetic" comments then you should have a pretty good idea who planted the virus.
It is vital to understand that there is no truth without discernment and no wisdom without the truth. What then is “faith” but an effort to confound truth and wisdom?
#17. To: Tatarewicz (#15)
That really sucks. My bet is that you are using a Windows OS for surfing without a good firewall. I rarely use Windows, but when I do, I make sure the firewall and anti-virus real time file scanner is always on and updated. If they aren't for some reason, I disconnect from the Internet immediately. With Linux Ubuntu I don't worry so much about viruses even though I do use their built in firewall called iptables to give me some protection. Since I have been using Ubuntu to surf the web I have got zero viruses. It pays to use an OS that is more secure, especially one that is open to all. It is very hard to hide back doors in an open source OS, there are way too many people seeing it for the holes to last for long. When I make some revealing comments about Organized Jewry's criminality, my keyboard stops working, 4um won't come up.
God is always good!
#18. To: angK (#16)
It sounds like your Norton Defrager utility moved files that were suppose to stay at a fixed location on your hard drive. I see no other reason why it would do anything to your copy function. Or, it could be a virus has embedded itself in your Norton Defragger utility. Virus makers like to hide their code in other programs so they are much harder to find and get rid of. I suspect that many Windows anti-virus companies have a secret division that actually makes and releases viruses so they can keep a demand up for their anti-virus products.
God is always good!
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