From The Boston Globe
By Courtney Humphries
To be single these days is to face a sea of advice about how to attract a partner. Men are attracted to youth and beauty; women are attracted to wealth and prestige. Or are they? There’s no shortage of impassioned opinion about what men and women want, yet there is little real evidence to support it. Even though finding love is one of our primary preoccupations, it has always been shrouded in mystery and guesswork. Adages like “opposites attract” feel comforting, but it would be even better to know what qualities actually entice potential partners in the real world.
To really answer the question in a scientific way, we’d need to be able to observe the behavior of thousands of single people and see whom they choose to pursue and whom they pass over. We would need a peephole into the dating world.
As it turns out, for the first time in history such a thing exists: It’s called online dating....
Unlike participants in a dating research study, online daters are behaving candidly, not modifying their behavior for an audience. “It gives us a window into the difference between what people say they want and what they actually do,” says Andrew Fiore, a social psychologist at Michigan State University....
Fiore and colleagues at [the School of Information at] University of California at Berkeley looked in detail at the profiles and messaging behaviors of online daters on a major (anonymous) American dating website. They confirmed some conventional gender roles: Men tend to look for younger women, while women look for older men; women were pickier than men about what they were looking for; and over 75 percent of messages were from men to women. They also found that responsiveness matters in messages: The faster someone replies to an initial message, the more likely he or she is to get a follow-up message. Fiore has also been one of the few researchers to study what happens in the weeks after online daters actually meet. He found that daters tend to like one another less after meeting. The judgments they formed about each other before meeting didn’t predict who would continue to date, though they sometimes predicted the quality of the relationship in those who formed one.