Online dating deception
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Men often claimed in their profiles being taller than they actually were. online dating deception Think his online dating profile sounds too good to be true. Some users feel that this can cause impersonal and random encounters, which share much of the awkwardness of the responsible blind date. In extreme cases, spouses, children, neighbors are pushed aside. This can lead to discord and awkwardness when meeting in real life. But though it could make for an interesting campaign year, such daters could be making a mistake if they are seeking anon-term partners.
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. It is perhaps for this reason that studies have shown that, unlike this guy, lies on dating profiles are generally quite minor. A recent study finds some evidence, though, that one particular group of online daters is more prone to lying than others — and that is people who are less physically attractive. In the study, 69 currently active online daters were invited to come into a lab. They were given their online dating profile and asked to rate the level of deception of specific elements of the profile on a scale of one to five. They were objectively measured for weight and height and asked to provide proof of their age. Finally they were photographed in three poses, one of which replicated their main profile picture. Judges undergraduate students rated -- on a scale of one to ten -- the pictures taken in the lab and the main profile picture for attractiveness. They found that less attractive people were more likely to have chosen a profile picture in which they were significantly more attractive than they were in everyday life. Women appeared to used this form of deception more than did men. I personally suspect, though, that this gender difference has less to do with male versus female deception and more to do with how much make-up a woman wears in the middle of the day to a lab experiment compared to when out for a date. They also found that the less attractive a person was the more likely they were to have lied about objective measures of physical attractiveness such as height and weight. In general, women were not any more deceptive in their profiles regarding physical attractiveness than were men. Interestingly, especially given that we have already seen that men can compensate for being less attractive by having higher incomes in on Dollar and Sex , in this study there is little evidence that less physically attractive people were more guilty of elevating their social status. One point about this study: the participants ranged in age from 18 to 53, and yet the judges ranged in age from 18 to 22. I raise this issue because the strongest results in the paper are the ones measuring photographic self-deception, where people have posted pictures of themselves in which they appear significantly more attractive than they do in everyday life. The older a dater is the more likely it is that they have posted a profile picture in which they are younger. Eighteen year-olds do not post five year old pictures while a fifty year old might. If they had, they might have found not that less attractive people were more deceptive, but that older people were more deceptive. Older women operate on a very competitive market where they are compared not only with women in their age cohort but also women who are much younger than themselves. If they deceive in their profiles it is probably not because they evaluate themselves as being less attractive, and feel the need to compensate for that fact, but because they accurately assess that they need to do that in order to attract the attention of men who prefer to spend their time chatting online with women who could be their daughters. 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. I have said this before, but I always think that researchers need to control for how long a person has been trying to find a mate online. It seems likely that if you post your profile, and then have no success, you will eventually want to go back and tweak your profile in order to be captured in more searches. Less attractive people are bound to spend longer looking for love online. They might also be using an older picture simply because that is the one they put up when they started the process and have failed to update it as they have aged. 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's just a function of time on the market. Or a 75 year-old man looking at the mother of his children and thinking that if she had only been curvy, instead of just plump, his life with her would have been so much better. If people deceive in their online profiles it is because they perceive that these qualities are actually important enough to lie about. I would love to see some evidence that in terms of quality of long-term matches that this is actually the case.
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