In online dating, ignorance is virtual bliss

By Jeanna Bryner

LiveScience staff writer

updated 1:59 p.m. ET Feb. 13, 2007

The next time you log onto a dating site, you might want to add “mysterious” to your list of desired traits, because the less you know about a potential mate, the better.

A new study of romantic relationships finds that as online daters got to know another person over time, their initially sweet notions turned sour. The researchers suggest that inflated expectations can lead to major disappointments when daters meet in person. Once a flaw is spotted, the whole date is tainted.

Fantasies vanishing with knowledge is a process that hits women harder than men, said Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and one of the study's authors.

Women expect more
“On online dates, women are much, much more disappointed than men," Norton said. Women put more stock in the virtual dating world because they seek a soul mate, he said, whereas men are typically after a more casual relationship.

It's not that familiarity always breeds contempt, the researchers say. But on average, as you learn more about any lover, the less likely it is that you will click and get along with them, Norton explained.

Norton and his colleagues, including Dan Ariely of MIT and Jeana Frost of Boston University, initiated the study with the help of online dating services like eHarmony and Match.com, though he refused to say which specific ones. “We were working with a couple of online dating companies who were finding that their users got very unhappy very quickly with online dating. And the question was why,” Norton said.

Keep me in the dark, please
To find out, they showed each of 304 online daters — average age 34 — a grab bag of anywhere from one to 10 traits randomly culled from more than 200 characteristics gathered from real online daters. Each online participant rated how much they liked their potential date, as well as which traits they would also use to describe themselves.

Participants gave much lower ratings to potential dates and also perceived less similarity with them when they were shown greater, rather than fewer, numbers of traits.

The results are detailed in the January issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Two additional experiments backed up this finding. In one, scientists asked each of 190 students to complete a Web-based survey in which they were shown 10 traits, one at a time. After seeing each trait, subjects would indicate whether that trait also described them.

The first trait had a negative amplifying effect, the scientists found. If subjects said the first trait failed to describe them, they were more likely to say the same of subsequent traits presented to them. The opposite was found if the first trait got a positive score.

“Inevitably, I’m going to find something we don’t agree on. And as soon as I find that one thing, then things start to cascade so everything else I learn about you suddenly now feels like more evidence that we are dissimilar and we don’t get along,” Norton said. 

“Once you start this process of saying, ‘Ah, it’s not going well,’ it’s like an avalanche, basically,” Norton said.

In the second reinforcing experiment, scientists surveyed two groups of online daters. Subjects in one group answered questions about an upcoming date. The other subjects answered questions about a past date.

These results also showed that getting to know a person is a real downer for romance. The scores given to pre-dates were much higher than those for post-dates. And the perceived degree of similarity between participants and dates also took a dive after face-to-face encounters.

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