the curious allure of dating apps
why finding love on apps is a qualitatively different experience
If you live in the US, you are much likelier to meet your SO on a dating app than through friends, work, or at a public place.
As evidenced in the data, dating apps have demonstrated a level of effectiveness in matchmaking surpassing that of humans. Globally, popularity has skyrocketed over the last few years: as more people feel comfortable using online dating, the stigma around it goes down, the available pool of people increases, and the experience gets better over time, maximising a user’s odds for love.
In spite of their effectiveness, data suggests that dating apps leave users somewhat disappointed and unhappy with their overall experience: 45% of online daters report feeling frustrated after using the apps, while 56% of adults view dating apps as somewhat or very negative, citing exhaustion, burnout, and apathy.
Why apps disappoint
1) Overpromising, underdelivering
Apps market themselves as the go-to solution for when loneliness tugs; an inkling of hope is often enough to convert singles into users, especially in the face of limited other options. Being the most promising solution solving a significant user pain-point is desirable from a product marketing standpoint - it prompts quick user-conversions, with low acquisition costs, simply by virtue of existing.
Yet, net mental health effects seem to be tending towards negative. A potential explanation for this can be derived from the neuroscience of disappointment:
Outcomes > expectations ==> net positive affect
Outcomes = expectations ==> net neutral
Outcomes < expectations ==> net negative affect
When expectations don’t align with reality, the misalignment of experiences stimulates a pathway in the basal ganglia, causing a negative dopamine response - the result of which is disappointment that the promised reward was not received. In steeping user expectations with the promise of an ideal someone in exchange for time, data, and money, they often underdeliver.
The expectation/outcome framework also explains why the rush of excitement, butterflies, and sweaty palms are more likely when you match with someone in the real world, unexpectedly - a surprising encounter triggers a positive dopamine response.
2) Habituation
Dating apps become less exciting over time. After the novelty of the initial swipes wears off, users get used to the act of continuous swiping over new profiles, and repeated profile presentation incites slightly less excitement each time. Habituation may explain why long-time users are likely to be less enthusiastic about online dating, and more likely to quit because of boredom or burnout.
3) Abundance
With an abundance of users, dating apps create the illusion of choice - interactions are short-lived and high in frequency. A perception of limitless selection dilutes the value of a given interaction, so that exchanges are probationary and low-stakes. Dating becomes a game of trial-and-error as users shop around, breezing through profiles and ghosting liberally. Social costs are low, since users aren’t tied to the obligations that would accompany being a part of a common social group.
The intensity of emotional experience surrounding a typical exchange between a prospective couple is diminished with this systematic casualization of romantic interaction. Such a design breeds nonchalance, and the longtail of users who value early commitment are quickly left disappointed.
How they get you to stay anyway
Despite the negative sentiments associated with long-term use, an estimated 40 million people continue to use dating services regularly. 72% of millennials report having used Tinder, and the number of dating-app users between the ages 18 and 24 has tripled in the last two years. Some theories for why dating apps continue to remain popular include:
1) Usability & ubiquity
Stanford psychologist Fogg’s behaviour model describes the ‘six elements of usability’ of a product, app, or service: 1) time, 2) money, 3) physical effort, 4) brain cycles, 5) social-deviance, and 6) non-routineness.
Reducing each of these factors increases the usability, access, and feasibility of a product or service. Online dating has systematically diminished the barriers associated with traditional courtship, to make dating less time-intensive, expensive, and effortful, reducing the barriers of time, money, and physical effort (1, 2, 3). In addition, making an instinctive judgment on which way to swipe based on no more than a few pictures and lines of text ensures that the cognitive load associated with completing tasks is minimal (4). Attention-capturing triggers, like notifications and color, make it easy to integrate online dating into one’s common routine (5).
Notably, the lack of stigma associated with online dating in the recent years has led to an explosion of dating apps across countries and cultures (6). While in 2005, few Americans would agree with the statement ‘online dating is a good way to meet people’, 59% people agreed with this statement in 2013 - the number is almost certainly higher today.
2) Hooks
Like most consumer social apps, dating apps leverage hooks to get a user to open up the app. Some hooks are psychological: for example, enticing the user by the prospect of reward, caused by the subconscious positive emotional association created between opening up the app and experiencing a reward sensation. Others include attention-capturing triggers, like notifications, colorful icons, and zingy sounds, to redirect users to the app, and initiate a reward-loop.
3) Maximising addictiveness
You’ve opened the app, and created a profile; now they need to get you to stay. Cognitive rewards is one strategy used to maximise the likelihood of continued usage of the app, i.e. addictiveness. Cognitive rewards are useful in establishing a behaviour, such as app usage, and incentivising it to persist over time. Establishing a behaviour is achieved by what psychologists call a continuous reward schedule - that is, a user is rewarded when they interact with the service. When a user downloads the app, high-ranked profiles will be displayed at the very front – profiles that the app’s algorithm has scored highly using whatever weighted probabilities make up their secret sauce – providing a novel reward each time a user swipes to the next profile.
Addictiveness is increased when the reward becomes variable, or pops up only occasionally. Psychologists call linking user’s actions with variable rewards a variable ratio reward schedule – a user can keep swiping, but high-compatibility profiles are interspersed and scattered, providing an exciting reward to elicit an emotional response at irregular intervals.
User goals and heuristics mediate behaviour on apps
1) User goals
In motivated users, the brain assigns a high value to the behaviour of checking dating apps. Individuals who self-report that they are keen on finding a romantic partner show increased activity in the DLPFC region of the brain when using dating apps, an area associated with goal value. Research indicates that the DPLFC actually assigns a greater value to the behaviour of frequently checking dating apps, indicating that dating apps occupy neural real-estate in individuals who are highly motivated to find love.
Motivation is high when users expect positive outcomes. Consider a version of the expectancy-value theory:
degree of motivation = expectancy * value
The degree of motivation to use dating apps appears to be influenced in part by a user’s appraisal of their likelihood of getting a match.
Degree of motivation affects communication and behaviour. A user’s level of motivation has consequences for how they interact with people on the app: highly motivated users may approach online dating with a more optimistic attitude, making them more likely to take risks and ignore negative outcomes. Optimistic users also fall victim to the planning fallacy, believing overly optimistic forecasts of an outcome, like underestimating how long it would take to find an ideal match.
2) Heuristics
Apps are designed to provoke minimal cognitive processing and decrease the cognitive burden or work by the user; they are designed for simplicity, ease, and intuition. The minimalist design of profiles, with no more than a few pictures and lines of text, appeals to System 1 thinking - quick processing, followed by an instinctive assessment of the profile, and a knee-jerk response left or right.
But there is a risk in leaving this appraisal to the behest of System 1 thinking - it is characterised by biases, heuristics, and tendencies. Daniel Kahneman writes,
“The measure of success for System 1 is the coherence of the story it manages to create; the amount and quality on which the story is based is largely irrelevant.”
Often, a single profile amounts to the information users have about the person in question, forcing a swiper to make judgements and inferences based on the limited information available. Though there may be an absence of data critical to forming a holistic judgment, conviction in a match is mediated by the available data, leading to a distorted sense of confidence if the available data is promising. Confidence steeps expectations, invoking a negative dopamine response when the in-person interaction doesn’t live up.
With potential gains high, social costs low, psychological incentive strong, and adoption almost ubiquitous, dating apps are here to stay. It seems worthwhile, then, to think about how to best design them, so that we can shape kinder experiences for the future generations of dreamers.