One of the strange features of human love is the asymmetry between the roles of men and women. In recent years, the rise of online dating platforms and the vast databases they create has allowed researchers to study the phenomenon in greater detail. Studies have shown that, in general, men tend to reach out to women, while women tend to be swarmed by suitors and respond selectively to those advances. But online love has changed the pattern of human love, and may even change the very foundation of society. So it wouldn’t be surprising if it also changed this asymmetry in romantic behavior. But is this really the case? Will this asymmetry change? A study by Rachel Dinh and her colleagues at the University of Oxford, UK, brings us closer to the answer. They looked at changes in dating behaviour on the UK website eHarmony over a 10-year period.
Left picture: abscissa: Year; Ordinate: the ratio of the initiator. Right: abscissa: year; Ordinate: initiating behavioral changes (female-male); Legend: male; women
The asymmetry did change during that time, they said, but it did not decline as they had expected. Instead, to their surprise, the asymmetry became more pronounced. Their approach is relatively straightforward. Starting with data from 2007 to 2018, Dingher and her colleagues looked at the profiles and messaging of 150,000 heterosexual users on eHarmony’s U.K. site. They then mined the data to determine how many people each user communicated with and whether he or she reached out to them. Because of the long study span, they were able to see how these connections changed over time. The results showed that men approached each other more frequently than women. And, over time, the differences increased even further — a finding dingher and her colleagues describe as counterintuitive. “At the outset, one might have hoped that online dating would create a more level playing field for women, but it is clear that online dating not only reflects but also reinforces male dominance in courtship activities,” Dingher et al. Researchers think they know why. They figured that women would soon find that the news would flood in, so they would sit back and wait for it to arrive. Men, by contrast, quickly learn that they have nothing to lose by making the first move, so they reach out to women more actively. Team members offered another explanation: ‘The introduction and widespread adoption of mobile dating apps such as Tinder in 2014 May also explain why the frequency of female advances has dropped dramatically in subsequent years, as the cost of signaling and psychological construction required for men to initiate a message has fallen as online dating has become more popular.’ This has interesting implications for the way online dating has evolved. Obviously, the perceived cost of sending and replying to messages is an important issue. Men find the cost low, while women sometimes delay responding for fear of appearing too “horny.” This kind of thinking seems to be driving changes in online dating behavior. Interestingly, several dating sites have sprung up to try to change this evolution. Mr. Dinh and others pointed to Bumble, a site that matches potential romantic partners but only allows women to reach out to the opposite sex. It’s worth noting that a woman has only 24 hours to start a conversation, because after that point, the match disappears. “Any concern that responding too quickly would appear overly enthusiastic would be dispelled because everyone knew there was no alternative in the APP,” Mr. Dinh and others said. This dramatically changes the course of evolution. “By designing the opposite of traditional markets,” the researchers wrote, “Bumble strategically limits user behavior, thereby shifting users from a bad balance — low-quality information and low response rates — to a better balance.” Whether the design will become more popular is unclear. But Bumble’s model does show that online behavior can evolve quickly. An interesting line of future research is to see how these findings interact with the real world. In the real world, the traditional cost of active communication and fear of rejection still exists. In this case, the evolution of behavior may be relatively slow. There is also the possibility that online dating in the UK may behave very differently from online dating in the rest of the world. So another line of research is to look at how people’s online dating behavior differs geographically. There are a lot of treasures to be found in data mining of romantic behaviors.