Love, Lies, and What They Learned. (The New York Times, 11/13/2011)
Excerpt: There are millions of Americans seeking love on the Internet. Little do they know that teams of scientists are eagerly watching them trying to find it.
Andrew T. Fiore, a scientist at Facebook, said online dating provides “true to life” data.
Like contemporary Margaret Meads, these scholars have gathered data from dating sites like Match.com, OkCupid and Yahoo! Personals [Oops!!] 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 bedeviled humanity since Adam and Eve: how and why do people fall in love?
Some of the numbers in this article.
21%
Heterosexual couples who meet online.
61%
Same-sex couples who meet online
Andrew T. Fiore, data scientist at Facebook and a former visiting assistant professor at Michigan State University.
81%
People who "misrepresent" their height, weight or age in their profiles.
- Women subtract 8.5 pounds
- Men subtracts 2
Catalina L. Toma, assistant professor, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
80%
White dating service members contact other white members.
3%
Whites contact blacks. (Blacks 10 times more likely to contact whites.)
Gerald A. Mendelsohn, Professor, Psychology Department, University of California, Berkeley.
No comments:
Post a Comment