Like contemporary Margaret Meads, these scholars have gathered data from dating sites like 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 bedeviled 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 A. 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 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 United States last month, according to the Internet tracking firm Experian Hitwise.)

Andrew T. Fiore, a data scientist at Facebook and a former visiting assistant professor at Michigan State University, said that unlike laboratory 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 United States between 2007 and 2009, 21 percent of heterosexual couples and 61 percent of same-sex 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 gotten cozy before; the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers, for example, is 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 in-person interviews by recruiting online daters through advertisements on campuses, in newspapers and on Web sites 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 percent of people misrepresent their height, weight or age in their profiles, according to a study led by Catalina L. Toma, an assistant professor in the department of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wanted to learn more about how people present 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.

Professor Toma; Jeffrey T. Hancock, an associate professor at Cornell; and Nicole B. 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 licenses 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 2 pounds, though they lied by a greater magnitude than women about their height, rounding up a half inch (apparently every bit counts).

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/fashion/online-dating-as-scientific-research.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

I’ve been on and off online dating sites for years now, and I’m back on. It’s amazing that as far as they’ve come, there is still one area where they have it really wrong. This would affect just about every user each site has, and I’m surprised they haven’t done more about it.

The issue: do you have children and do you want children. Seems like something you really want to get RIGHT. You don’t want to match someone who doesn’t want children with someone who does. You don’t want to match someone who already has children to someone who doesn’t want to date someone with children. OKCupid uses things like “likes children.” Does that mean you want them? Or you don’t mind if someone else has them? Or you kinda don’t like them, but might date someone with them?

I noticed the problem in 2009 when eHarmony kept sending me guys who had children. It was easy to figure out who those guys are because in the “what I’m most thankful for,” parents typically write things like, “My kids.” And let’s be clear: I don’t have children, I don’t want children, and the older I get, the more I feel like I don’t want to date someone who has children. So my profiles are all marked things like, “Doesn’t want children,” or for eHarmony, “Has kids at home: no. Wants kids: no.”

But there is the problem right there, and they still haven’t fixed it. eHarmony matches me with men who “don’t have kids at home.” This means the kids are adults no longer living at home. Or someone else has custody. Or the state took the children away from this man. I have no idea. So the “What I’m thankful for” part is the only clue I get to whether a man marked, “has kids at home: no,” has ZERO kids, or has kids he’s really thankful for, and they just live somewhere else.

When I complained to eHarmony in 2009, they told me that their system treats child preference as low priority. No idea what UX or product person decided that whether or not someone has or wants kids is not an important matching point on a dating website. But that was their answer: they are matching me with these men because other than that, the system says we are a GREAT match, so maybe matching in other ways is more important.

It’s not more important.

It makes no sense to match a man who has kids with a woman who doesn’t want kids. Religion, kids, and politics are often things that people really need to be on the same page about to have a successful relationship. I can’t imagine starting a relationship with a man with a ticking biological clock knowing that I have no biological clock. Not the same page. I have dated men who have children, and I’m a good spare Mom, but it’s my strong preference to date a guy without kids. If you have kids, you’d better be my otherwise-100%-perfect-unbelievable-soul-mate-life-partner match!

I’m on eHarmony again as I write this, and I complained again about how nearly every match they send me has kids. The email I got back basically told me that if not having kids is important to me, I should mention that in my profile. It’s already in my profile. That doesn’t keep the system from matching me with guys who are so grateful for their 2 daughters.

Let’s Boil This Down To The Product Level

If I worked on a dating site as a UX or product person, one of my main thoughts would be, “How I do I keep two terribly-matched people from being matched?” You wouldn’t want to match a Born-Again Christian with an atheist. What questions do we need to ask people, and how do we need to ask them so that two badly-matched people are not presented to each other as potential life partners? If I got to affect the product, here is how I would do this:

1. How many children do you have? [number] (My number would be zero.)
2. (If the above is 0) Where do the children live? [choose one below:]
   1. They mostly/always live with me.
   2. They mostly/always live with another caretaker.
   3. They are adults, and live on their own.
3. Do you want to have or adopt children in the future? [yes/no] (I’d say no.)
4. How do you feel about a partner who already has children? [select all that apply:]
   1. My partner must not have any children. (This covers me.)
   2. It’s OK if my partner has children, but it’s best if they don’t live with him full time.
   3. It’s OK if my partner has children, and it’s OK if they lived with him full time.

Super! We now have all our data. All they then need to do is match me with guys who otherwise match me, AND answered zero to question 1 and NO to question 3. The dating website would know that’s my preference because I answered NO to question 3 and only checked off A for question 4. The other questions and choices cover everybody else, and we don’t have to go into weird grey areas like, “Likes kids.” If you want or have them, we’re going to HOPE you like them.

There are dating websites out there for every religion, ethnicity, and in some cases fetish. If I decide I am a Portuguese-American lesbian Jewish little person, there is probably a dating website for me. Yet, I have not yet found any decently-operating dating website aimed at those of us in the “child-free” movement. No, I don’t consider dinklink.com or kidfreesingles.com decent websites. Could someone please whip that up? Thanks!

Source: http://brassflowers.com/biggest-online-dating-website-fail/