Dollars and Sex (12 page)
Authors: Marina Adshade
The phenomenon that I am talking about here is what social psychologists call “contrast effects.” These effects suggest that when presented with an image that is ranked much higher than the image shown after it, individuals will rank the second image lower than they would have otherwise because of the contrast between the two images. Field studies have shown that men who have been exposed to images of very attractive women will rank average women as less attractive than they would have had they been exposed to a different set of images, like landscapes, or if they'd seen the average woman before they saw the attractive woman.
Said another way, profile pictures on online dating sites are creating “beauty inflation”; they are driving up an individual's perceptions of their own value by skewing perception of beauty distribution overall. And, it isn't only beauty that is inflated but all the other qualities that people enhance when describing themselves online.
Self-reporting has left everyone with the impression that there is an entire online market filled with attractive, educated, high-income individuals just waiting to go for picnics in the park and long walks on the beach. That probably seems wonderful to people who have just started searching. However, in the long run, the perception that everyone is above average prevents the market from clearing as quickly as it might have otherwise because it encourages seekers to overestimate how well they will do on that market.
Given that most of us (including men) are depreciating assets, that is, our value on the dating market falls as we age, the more accurately we determine where we sit on the market at the beginning, the better off we will be in the long run. In fact, it is essential if we hope to exit this market before our value starts to decline.
The economic approach suggests that dating markets in which players start with informed (and honest) estimations of their own valueâand think about the value of potential matches in terms of the trade-offs they are willing to accept rather than requiring that they fulfill a list of requirementsâare likely to clear more quickly because more people find love sooner.
CAN YOU EVER BE TOO RICH OR TOO THIN?As much as economists like to describe human behavior in the simplest terms possible, people are, really, very complicated creatures. Finding the perfect mate, as I have already said, is more about experience then about checking off items on a list. And even if the latter is all we do, sometimes it is the combination of traits that matter, not the just the individual traits themselves.
As I have said, physical attractiveness is an important characteristic that women look for in a partner, but women also care about the resources a man brings into the match. Psychologists Simon Chu, Danielle Farr, Luna Muñoz, and John Lycett suggest that while women may prefer a man who is handsome over one who is plain, and a man who is rich over one who is poor, when given a choice, they prefer a handsome man who has lower income over a handsome man who has a higher income.
This seemingly contradictory evidence can be linked to women's preferences to find faithful partners; if a woman can have a handsome man, she would prefer one whom she doesn't have to share with other women, which would be more likely if he also had a high income. The proof is in the numbers. Researchers on this project created online dating profiles for twenty fictional men who varied in terms of physical attractiveness (rated independently on a scale of 1 to 10) and who were assigned an occupational class: high status (doctor, architect), medium status (teacher, social workers), and low status (postman, call-center operator). The dating profiles were shown to women who were then asked which of the men they would prefer for a long-term relationship.
The results suggest that women prefer a man who has a medium income level over a man who has a high income level if he is physically attractive (more than a 7 out of 10). If he is less attractive, though, (between a 4 and a 6), women prefer a man who has a high income level over one who has a medium income level. The strongest results are among women who are less trusting and those who rate themselves as less likely to be successful on the mating market.
So, the general conclusion is that a woman who is afraid that her mate will not be faithful will avoid men whom she believes will attract other women. This could be because she thinks he will cheat, but it could also be that mate guarding is exhausting, and she would rather not incur the cost of being in a relationship with a man who is constantly being pursued by other women.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATIONI have confined my discussion here to people searching on an online dating site, but social networking sites are outpacing traditional dating sites as places where new couples can meet.
For example, an Oxford Internet Institute report by Bernie Hogan, Nai Li, and William Dutton finds that 30 percent of cohabiting couples who met on the Internet since 1997 met on social networking sites compared with 28 percent who met on sites whose specific purpose is to bring people together for romance (i.e., online dating sites). Given that social networking did not become widespread until the beginning of the new millennium, this figure seriously understates how much online dating is happening off dating sites right now.
The value of a social networking site is that it is more experiential than a dating site. You can still get a sense of observable quantitative features on dating sites (age, education, etc.), but you can also do something that is even more important; you can observe the interactions of prospective dates with other people on the site. Among the additional information that these observations give us is how others judge this person. This information helps us to determine a prospective partner's place on the dating market, which is useful when trying to find a mate whose value is equal to our own.
So here's a question: If social networking sites have become the main place to find love on the Internet, then why would anyone pay for an Internet dating service? The free online dating services have put together a pretty convincing case that there are far fewer potential matches on fee-for-service dating sites than on the free sites. This is probably true, but searchers are not looking for a dozen potential matesâthey are looking for one actual mate. And the evidence suggests that if you meet someone on an online dating site, that someone is more likely to be willing to meet with you in person if they have paid a fee for the service.
LESS-ATTRACTIVE PEOPLE HAVE MORE DECEPTIVE ONLINE DATING PROFILES
Several years ago, I was chatting on an online dating site with a man who claimed to have a graduate degree. When I asked him what his degree was, he revealed that in reality he had spent six years in community college, repeatedly starting but failing to complete programs. His comment was,
“
I could have been a doctor by now!
”
To which I responded,
“
Good-bye.
”
No one likes to be deceived by a person with whom one hopes to one day develop a trusting relationship. It is perhaps for this reason that studies have shown that, unlike this guy, lies on dating profiles are generally quite minor. Men make themselves a little taller (by about an inch) and women make themselves a little thinner (by about eight pounds). But unless you spent a summer working at a local fair guessing people
'
s weight and height, the deceptions are so small, on average, that most people probably wouldn
'
t pick them out on a first date.
A recent study by communications researchers Catalina Toma and Jeffrey Hancock, though, finds that one particular group of online daters is more prone to lying than others
â
and that is people who are less physically attractive.
This research suggests that less-attractive people are more likely to have chosen a profile picture in which they are significantly more attractive than they are in everyday life and are more likely to lie about objective measures of physical attractiveness such as height and weight.
Interestingly, less-attractive people do not appear to try and compensate for their lack of good looks by elevating
their social status; they aren't any more likely than more-attractive people to over-report their income, education, or occupation levels.
This raises a more general issue and that is the underlying assumption that men and women are good at assessing their place on the market in terms of physical attractiveness. It is possible that what really is happening here is that less-attractive people spend longer looking for love online and, given their lack of success, eventually start to tweak their profiles in order to attract a greater response than they had previously. If people “revise” their profile over time in the hope of attracting more attention, then the data will make it appear as if less-attractive people are more deceptive. If this is the case, then the relationship between deception and attractiveness is not a result of people assessing themselves as being less attractive; it is a function of time spent searching on the market.
A recent study by psychologist Martin Coleman tests this theory in an online dating simulation where participants “pay” a fee to search online for potential dates after answering a series of questions describing their perfect mate. At the end of the search, they are informed that a match has been found but that he/she does not have all the qualities the participants have been searching for (I think we all can relate to that experience!). At this point in the simulation, the participant is informed that a friend would like to set them up on a blind date with a person who is
absolutely perfect in terms of their criteria for a mate. Participants then have to choose how much of a single hour they would be willing to commit to the inferior date from the online service and how much to the superior match that is the blind date.
It turns out that a person's preference to spend time with the person they met online is related to how much they had paid for the online dating service. Those who paid nothing, or very little, for the search were much less willing to choose the online date over the blind date compared with those who paid a higher fee. For example, the length of time men in the study chose to commit to the date that was arranged online was twenty-eight minutes when the cost of the online service was $0 and almost forty-nine minutes when the cost of the service was $50. The length of time women in the study chose to commit to the online date was thirteen minutes when the cost of the service was $0 and twenty-eight minutes when the cost of the service was $50.
FINAL WORDSA while back, a friend tried to set me up with a guy she knew. He was in his late 40s, chronically unemployed, and in the midst of a very nasty divorce that involved three children. So I said, “Sure!” (Did I mention that I have been single for a while?) When she told him about gainfully employed, scholarly me, his response was, “No thanks, I am only interested in dating women younger than 25.”
Here is a man who would clearly benefit from an economic perspective of markets for sex and love.
These economic dating market stories that I have shared here are not just important for those of use who are still searching for loveâthey help to explain a whole range of economic and social phenomena of our modern society.