In an attempt to make online dating decision making even simpler than what it once was, apps like Tinder, Happn, Hinge, Coffee Meets Bagel and more offer the opportunity to decide who you like and who you don’t based on a picture and almost no information. This new phenomenon caught the interest of Rory McGloin and his colleagues at the University of Connecticut, Amanda Denes and Olivia Kamisher who conducted a recent study of about 300 heterosexual volunteers. Author Brian Handwerk recently broke down the study on Smithsonian.com.
“It seems that the women were placing faith in the attractiveness of the males. It's almost hopeful, as opposed to the fellas who may have taken a more kind of realistic approach,” says McGloin. He and his team of researchers used different photos of the same person when surveying the volunteers. “The fact that we had the exact same person but could manipulate their attractiveness the way we wanted to by just showing a single picture really reinforces how important that profile picture is and what it does to the entire attitude you adopt when you look at someone's profile,” he says. This kind of image manipulation may seem unfair, but most app users actually expect it. Many previous studies by other groups show that people are willing to accept a certain amount of deception in how others present themselves online and even adopt those strategies themselves.
Despite the ubiquitous knowledge that all isn't what it seems online, men and women still reacted quite differently to attractive images. The researchers found that men and women place very different levels of trust in an attractive profile picture. Men shown images of “beautified” women—with enhanced lighting, hair and makeup—rated them to be hotter but less trustworthy than regular pictures of the same people. But women shown enhanced pictures of men said they seemed both more attractive and more trust worthy than their unenhanced counterparts. When asked to rate trustworthiness on a 1-to-10 scale, men that saw an enhanced picture of a woman rated her lower than the score given to the normal photo of the exact same woman. However, women rated the enhanced men as more trust worthy than the regular men.
In addition, while males were less trusting of attractive women, good looks seemed to trump their suspicions. They still reported a higher desire to date the woman in an enhanced photo than the one in her normal picture.
With Love Lab you can take photos and videos using the camera in the app that will disappear after they’ve been looked at once so you can be sure that whoever you are chatting with looks like their photos. Age verification and criminal background checks are also free and optional. Download Love Lab at http://lovelab.com.