OPW INTERVIEW - Sep 29 - Michael Norton is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. In 2008, he co-published the report entitled “People Are Experience Goods: Improving Online Dating with Virtual Dates.” – Jenn Rubin
Mike, the first sentence of your report declares “online dating frequently fails to meet user expectations.” How did you and your team come to this conclusion?
We were trying to figure out what was right and what was wrong with online dating. So, we created our own online dating site called TheMatchUp.Net. Our online daters were probably in their 20s and 30s and mainly from Massachusetts and New York.
We found that people have these really high expectations for online dating – maybe unrealistically high. They thought they would look through these people, find their soul mate, get married and live happily ever after. Then, when they went on dates and those expectations weren’t quite met, they ended up getting disappointed.
Why else were online daters frustrated?
We asked people how happy they were with their online dating experience, as well as if they were looking for a long-term relationship or a short-term hook up. What we found is women who are looking for a short-term hook up and men who are looking for a long-term relationship end up happy with their experiences. Yet those two groups of users are about 5 percent of the population.
It is the huge groups of people that are looking for the opposite that don’t seem to be having as much fun or success on these sites.
Tell me about some of the other interesting findings from the study.
One of the things we found, which was a bit sad, was that online daters thought when they met someone, they would grow to like them more and more as the dating process advanced. In fact, what we show in our data is on average the more you get to know someone, the less you like them. We called another one of our papers “Why Familiarity Breeds Contempt.”
What specific features do you recommend online dating sites implement?
We found that when we sent people on virtual dates before they met in person, they tended to click better when we actually had them meet in person.
We designed virtual dates ourselves. You would have an avatar and wander around a virtual space. Our virtual dates were designed in general to be cheesy first dates, like going to a museum. The two of you could wander around in this space and chat with each other about the artwork or the other people who were also on dates.
The notion was let’s insert a virtual date, where people can learn a little about each other but not have crazy expectations that this person will be the greatest person in the world.
Yet in the report, it states, “Search time invested fails to pay off in a commensurate number of face-to-face encounters.” How is virtual dating a solution to this issue?
One of the tricks with having to meet somebody face to face is how much time it takes. You have to go somewhere. So, you have travel time, and you also have to get ready to go. With virtual dates, we designed ours to be brief, five-minute interactions. The notion was we can give people a lot of flexibility as to when they go on these dates and save them time in case they end up not liking their partner.
In this in-between space, are we really interacting? It’s certainly more so than just exchanging e-mails but clearly much less so than meeting face to face.
Participants in your study reported though spending an average of 5.2 hours per week searching through profiles, along with another 6.7 hours writing and responding to e-mails. Clearly, online dating can be time-consuming process. Does this benefit online dating sites from a business and revenue standpoint?
That speaks to a very tricky aspect of running an online dating company. If you have an online dating service where you find people instantly on Day 1 that are your soul mate, you might not have a sustainable business model. At the same time, if you have people who are on your site for five years and never find somebody that they like, they’re probably going to switch away from your service.
So, there is an interesting middle point at which you want users to be on your site long enough to be able to experience enough people and also ideally to charge enough membership fees that the business is sustainable. Yet you also at some point need to figure out how to meet their needs, so they find someone that they really do click with and then will spread positive word of mouth about your service.
Free sites, paid sites, niche sites – Is there a format that you find to be a notch above the rest?
It’s difficult to say across the board which site is the best as opposed to thinking that there are different people with different relationship needs. These different services can map onto different customer groups in terms of matching what it is they’re looking for.
Do you have future online dating studies planned?
We are not doing any right now. There are people who are looking at funny things like, for example, how honest people are in their dating profiles. There is a finding where the average height of men on online dating sites is above the population, so male online daters slightly lie about their height. However, their weight is exactly what the U.S. population would be. Whereas for female online daters, the height is exactly what the population is, but the weight is thinner than the average person.
Mr. Brooks, please do not forget those Researchers [Ariely, Norton, Frost, etc] suggested how to IMPROVE Online Dating Sites 1.0 / 1.5 and 2.0 [with virtual dates] and NOT how to INNOVATE in the Online Dating Industry 3.0!!!
Online Dating 1.0: First Generation "Browsing/Searching Options, Powerful Searching Engine"
Online Dating 1.5: Hybrid; "Unidirectional Recommendation Engine"
Online Dating 2.0: Second Generation "Matching based on Self-Reported Data / Bidirectional Recommendation Engine"
Online Dating 3.0: Third Generation "Compatibility Matching Algorithms"
Other Researchers also suggested other proposals to IMPROVE Online Dating Sites 1.0 / 1.5 and 2.0
Choo, Hortacsu, Hitsch, also Ariely (2006), suggested Gale_Shapley algorithm, General Equilibrium Theory and Non_cooperative Game Theory to explain stable marriage as an economic function (as a complex mental process).
papers:
* "What Makes You Click? — Mate Preferences and Matching Outcomes in Online Dating"
* "Matching and Sorting in Online Dating"
* "Who Marries Whom and Why"
* "Lifecycle marriage matching: Theory and evidence"
* "What matchings can be stable? The refutability of matching theory"
* "Equilibrium matching with ageing and uncertain careers: who marries whom and when?"
Gale_Shapley algorithm, General Equilibrium Theory and Non_cooperative Game Theory do not take into account temporal patterns of romantic relationship development nor personality traits.
Brozovsky & Petricek suggested Recommendation Engines based on the User-User and Item-Item collaborative filtering algorithms.
paper:
* "Recommender System for Online Dating Service"
"User-User and Item-Item collaborative filtering recommenders significantly outperform global algorithms that are currently used by dating sites [offering only Browsing / Searching Options, Powerful Searching Engine].
A blind experiment with real users [at a proprietary site named ColFi - exclusively designed for the experiment - where 111 users rated 150 photo-profiles, then two recommendation lists of top 10 profiles were generated] also confirmed that users prefer collaborative filtering based recommendations to global popularity recommendations [of 2 Czech online dating sites: ChceteMe (no longer exists now in 2009) and LibimSeTi]."
-------------------------------------
How to INNOVATE in the Online Dating Industry 3.0 ?
Interested readers should see these NEW & FRESH Scientific Papers:
PAPERS FOR 2009 at the 2009 biannual mini-Conference of the International Association
for Relationships Research (IARR), hosted by the Kansas University Close Relationships Interest Group (CRIG).
New Directions in Research on Close Relationships: Integrating Across Disciplines and
Theoretical Approaches, with a particular emphasis on cultural, neuroscientific, evolutionary, and health perspectives.
* "Comparing Assortative Mating and Life History Strategy as Predictors of Relationship Outcomes"
Sally Olderbak
".... When tested together in the same model, the couple's life history strategy not only predicted their level of assortative mating, indicating couples with a slower life history strategy are more assortatively mated, but was also the strongest predictor of relationship outcomes, indicating a couple's life history strategy may be more important
than their level of assortatively mating."
* "Relationship Science and Internet Matching Services"
Sue Sprecher
"Millions of single adults go to dating websites to search for partners. Although there are many types of Internet dating sites, some use a scientific approach to matching (e.g., eHarmony). These sites require members to complete lengthy questionnaires that were developed based on insights from the field of relationship science. Members are then matched based on what has been referred to as love or matching algorithms. Such matching formulas claim to be based on scientific principles and are translated into computer programs that can sift through the volumes of data. Although Internet dating sites have brought greater public awareness to the science of relationships, questions that need to be addressed include: What is the science that is being used and how effectively is it being used? How can we forge more connections between commercial dating websites and relationship science so that both benefit, as well as the singles who are seeking a compatible match?"
* "Personality, similarity, and marital satisfaction: Assessing a new tool.***"
Roberto Nihil et al.
"..... Results show that similarity in other-reported data predicts a better satisfaction. Finally, we suggest that conceiving personality in a less fragmentary way than it has been made over the past century could offer new ways to explore partner's similarity."
***"L.A.B.E.L. (List of adjectives in binomial form or as Likert scales): an assessment model of personality with universal aims"
* "The Role of Personality Similarity on the Dating Relationship Quality of Americans and Taiwanese"
Tsui-Feng Wu and Susan E. Cross, Yun-He Chou, Arnold Kong and Wen-Hua Hsieh.
"Personality similarity between couples is a very popular topic, which has been shown to positively associate with Americans' dating relationship quality (dating satisfaction and commitment). Personality similarity, however, may play a less important role in the relationship quality of Taiwanese than of Americans, because Taiwanese may motivate to adjust themselves to their partners and have less need to find similar partners (Heine & Renshaw, 2002).To estimate personality, we used both Western and Chinese indigenous scales: Big-Five Scale and Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory. Data were collected from 195 American and 184 Taiwanese college students who were in a romantic relationship. Results of simultaneous multiple regression analyses indicated that personality similarity significantly predicted Americans' dating relationship quality. However, personality similarity did not predict relationship quality of Taiwanese. Those results were confirmed by two moderating analyses in which culture moderated the relation between personality similarity and dating relationship quality."
* "The Relationships Between Love Style Similarity, Conflict Management and Relationship Satisfaction"
Cheng Wei Chuan, Jeaw Mei Chen
"... dissimilar couples had worse relationship satisfaction and adopted less compromising or integrating strategies and more avoiding than similar couples. ..."
-------------------------------------------------
PAPERS FOR 2010
Society for Personality and Social Psychology Conference in January 2010
2,043 posters/papers to analyze.
Here the ones I recommend to read!
"Relationship Quality and Personality Similarity: Differentiating Distinctiveness and Normativeness"
Madison Barfield
"Relationship Quality, Personality, and Response to Relationship Transgressions"
Yanna J. Weisberg
"Personality correlates of different romantic intentions in speed daters"
Ashley M. Vivlamore
"Using MySpace increases the endorsement of narcissistic personality traits"
Elise Freeman
"Who are you on Facebook? The role of personality and gender in online social networking sites"
Nicole Muscanell
"ePersonality: Differential perceptions of personality during online and real-world social interactions"
Oshrat A. Hodara
"Creating Shorter Personality Measures: Incorporating Item-Level Validity Diagnostics"
Fred Oswald
"Workers Behaving Badly: Personality at Age 18 Predicts Workplace Deviance at Age 32"
Kimdy Le
"If It Walks Like a Duck and Talks Like a Duck: Replication and Construct Validation of Proverb-Based Personality Dimensions"
Heather A. Haas
"The Positive and Negative Marital Qualities Scales and Relationship Satisfaction in Newlywed Couples"
Matthew Shaffer
Kindest Regards.
Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
[email protected]
Posted by: Fernando Ardenghi | Sep 29, 2009 at 10:02 PM
Fernando chill out already. I hope you realize that your repetitive comments are scaring off most of the online dating industry. Make your point in a sentence or three and move on.
Who in the world spend 7 hours a week writing dating emails? They need a dating coach.
Posted by: David Evans | Sep 30, 2009 at 10:26 AM