by Dan Ariely
We took a step back and thought about regular dating, that odd and complex ritual in which most of us participate at some point in our lives. From an evolutionary perspective, we would expect dating to be a useful process for prospective mates to get to know each other—one that has been tried and improved over the years. And if regular (offline) dating is a good mechanism—or at least the best one we have so far—why not use it as the starting point of our quest to create a better online dating experience?
If you think about how the standard practice of dating works, it is clear that it is not about two people sitting together in an empty space and focusing solely on each other or sharing an intense objection to the cold, rainy weather. It’s about experiencing something together: two people watching a movie, enjoying a meal, meeting at a dinner party or a museum, and so on. In other words, dating is about experiencing something with another person in an environment that is a catalyst for the interaction. By meeting someone at an art opening, a sporting event, or a zoo, we can see how that person interacts with the world around us—are they the type to treat a waitress badly and not tip or are they patient and considerate? We make observations that reveal information about what life in the real world might be like with the other person.
Assuming that the natural evolution of dating holds more wisdom than the engineers at eHarmony, we decided that we would try to bring some elements from real-world dating into online dating. Hoping to simulate the way people interact in real life, we set up a simple virtual dating site using “Chat Circles,” a virtual environment created by Fernanda Viégas and Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab. After logging on to this site, participants picked out a shape (a square, triangle, circle, etc.) and a color (red, green, yellow, blue, purple, etc.). Entering the virtual space as, say, a red circle, the participant would move a mouse to explore objects within the space. The objects included images of people, items such as shoes, movie clips, and some abstract art. Participants could also see other shapes that represented other daters. When two shapes moved close to each other, they could start an instant-message conversation. Obviously, this environment could not represent the full range of interactions one could experience on a real date, but we wanted to see how our version of virtual dating worked.
We hoped that our shapes would use the simulated galleries not only to talk about themselves but also to discuss the images they saw. As we expected, the resulting discussions resembled, rather closely, what happens in regular dating. (“Do you like that painting?” “Not particularly. I prefer Matisse.”)
OUR MAIN GOAL was to compare our (somewhat impoverished) virtual dating environment with a standard online one. To that end, we asked a group of eager daters to engage in one regular online date with another person (a process that entailed reading about another person’s typical vital statistics, answering questions about relationship goals, writing an open-ended personal essay, and writing to the other person). We also asked them to participate in one virtual date with a different person (which required the daters to explore the space together, look at different images, and text-chat with each other). After each of our participants met one person using a standard online dating process and another person using the virtual dating experience, we were ready for the showdown.
To set the stage for the competition between these two approaches, we organized a speed-dating event like the one described in chapter 7, “Hot or Not?” In our experimental speed-dating event, participants had an opportunity to meet face-to-face with a number of people, including the person they’d met in the virtual world and the person they’d met in our standard online dating scenario. Our speed-dating event differed slightly from the standard experience in another way, too. After each four-minute interaction at the tables, participants answered the following questions about the person they had just met:
How much do you like this person?
How similar do you think you are to this person?
How exciting do you find this person?
How comfortable do you feel with this person?
Our participants scored each question on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 meant “not at all” and 10 meant “very.” As is usual in speed-dating events, we also asked them to tell us whether they were interested in meeting the person again in the future.
TO RECAP, THE experiment had three parts. First, each of the participants went on one regular online date and one virtual date. Next, they went speed-dating with multiple people, including the person they met online and the person with whom they’d gone on the virtual date. (We didn’t point out people they’d met before, and we left it for them to recognize—or not—their past encounters.) Finally, at the end of each speed date, they told us what they thought about their dating partner and whether they would like to see that person again on a real-life date. We wanted to see whether the initial experience—either virtual or regular online dating—would make a real-life date more likely.
We found that both men and women liked their speed-dating partner more if they’d first met during the virtual date. In fact, they were about twice as likely to be interested in a real date after the virtual date than after the regular online one.
WHY WAS THE virtual dating approach so much more successful? I suspect the answer is that the basic structure used in our virtual dating world was much more compatible with another, much older structure: the human brain. In our virtual world, people made the same types of judgments about experiences and people that we are used to making in our daily lives. Because these judgments were more compatible with the way we naturally process information in real life, the virtual interactions were more useful and informative.
To illustrate, imagine that you are a single man who is interested in meeting a woman for a long-term relationship, and you go out to dinner with a woman named Janet. She is petite, has brown hair, brown eyes, and a nice smile, plays violin, likes movies, and is soft-spoken; perhaps she’s a little introverted. As you sip your wine, you ask yourself, “How much do I like her?” You might even ask yourself, “How likely am I to want to stay with her in the short-, medium-, and long-term future?”
Then you go on a date with a woman named Julia. Janet and Julia are different in many ways. Julia is taller and more extroverted than Janet, has an MBA and a soft laugh, and likes to go sailing. You may sense that you like Janet more than Julia and that you want to spend more time with her, but it’s not easy to say why or to isolate the few variables that make you prefer her. Is it her body shape? The way she smiles? Is it her sense of humor? You can’t put your finger on what it is about Janet, but you have a strong gut feeling about it.*
On top of that, even if both Janet and Julia accurately described themselves as having a sense of humor, what strikes one person as funny is not always funny to another. People who enjoy the Three Stooges may not appreciate Monty Python’s Flying Circus. David Letterman fans may not think much of The Office. Fans of any of these can rightfully claim to have a good sense of humor, but only by experiencing something with another person—say, watching Saturday Night Live together, either in person or in a virtual world—can you tell whether your senses of humor are compatible.
SPEED DATING FOR OLDER ADULTS
By the way, having an external object to react to works equally well in not-so-romantic encounters. Some time ago, Jeana Frost and I tried to run some speed-dating events for older (age sixty-five and above) adults. The objective was to open up the social circles of people who had just moved to a retirement community and, by doing so, improve their happiness and health.* We expected our speed-dating events to be a great success, but the first few were failures. Lots of people registered for them, yet when they sat at tables and faced each other, the discussions were slow to start and awkward.
Why did this happen? In standard speed-dating events, the discussions aren’t particularly interesting (“Where did you go to school?” “What do you do?”), but everyone understands the basic purpose—they’re trying to figure out if the person
they are talking to might be a romantic fit. In contrast, our older participants didn’t all share this underlying goal. Though some hoped for a romantic relationship, others were more interested in making friends. This multiplicity of goals made the whole process difficult, awkward, and ultimately unsatisfying.
Having realized what was going wrong, Jeana proposed that, for our next event, each person bring a personally important object (for example, a souvenir or a photograph) to use as a discussion starter. This time we could not stop people from talking. Their discussions were deeper and more interesting. The events resulted in many friendships. In this case, too, the presence of an external object helped catalyze the discussions and improve the outcome.
It’s interesting how sometimes all we need is something—anything—to get a good thing started.
At the end of the day, people are the marketing-terminology equivalent of experience goods. In the same way that the chemical composition of broccoli or pecan pie is not going to help us better understand what the real thing tastes like, breaking people up into their individual attributes is not very helpful in figuring out what it might be like to spend time or live with them. This is the essence of the problem with a market that attempts to turn people into a list of searchable attributes. Though words such as “eyes: brown” are easy to type and search, we don’t naturally view and evaluate potential romantic partners that way. This is also where the advantage of virtual dating comes into focus. It allows for more nuance and meaning and lets us use the same types of judgments that we are used to making in our daily lives.
In the end, our research findings suggest that the online market for single people should be structured with an understanding of what people can and can’t naturally do. It should use technology in ways that are congruent with what we are naturally good at and help us with the tasks that don’t fit with our innate abilities.
Designing Web Sites for Homer Simpson
Despite the invention of online dating sites, I think that the continued failure of the market for singles demonstrates the importance of social science. To be clear: I am all in favor of online dating. I just think it needs to be done in a more humanly compatible way.
Consider the following: when designers design physical products—shoes, belts, pants, cups, chairs, and so on—they take people’s physical limitations into account. They try to understand what human beings can and cannot do, so they create and manufacture products that can be used by all of us in our daily life (with a few notable exceptions, of course).
But when people design intangibles such as health insurance, savings plans, retirement plans, and even online dating sites, they somehow forget about people’s built-in limitations. Perhaps these designers are just overly sanguine about our abilities; they seem to assume that we are like Star Trek’s hyperrational Mr. Spock. Creators of intangible products and services assume that we know our own minds perfectly, can compute everything, compare all options, and always choose the best and most appropriate course of action.
But what if—as behavioral economics has shown in general and as we have shown for dating in particular—we are limited in the way we use and understand information? What if we are more like the fallible, myopic, vindictive, emotional, biased Homer Simpson than like Mr. Spock? This notion may seem depressing, but if we understand our limitations and take them into account, we can design a better world, starting with improved information-based products and services, such as online dating.
Building an online dating site for perfectly rational beings can be a fun intellectual exercise. But if the designers of such a Web site really want to create something that is useful for normal—albeit somewhat limited—people who are looking for a mate, they should first try to understand human limitations and use them as a starting point for their design. After all, even our rather simplistic and improvised virtual dating environment almost doubled the odds of face-to-face meetings. This suggests that it’s not all that difficult to take human capabilities and weaknesses into account. I would bet that an online dating site that incorporated humanly compatible design would not only be a big hit but would also help bring real, flesh-and-blood, compatible people together as well.
More generally, this examination of the online dating market suggests that markets can indeed be wonderful and useful; but to get them to achieve their full potential, we must structure them in a way that is compatible with what people can and can’t naturally do.
“SO WHAT ARE singles to do while we are all waiting for better online dating sites?”
That was the question put to me by a good friend who wanted to help out Sarah, a woman who works in his office. Obviously, I’m not a qualified yenta. But in the end, I do think that there are a few personal lessons to be learned from this research.
First, given the relative success of our virtual dating experience, Sarah should try to make her online dating interactions a bit more like regular dating. She can try to engage her romantic prospects in conversations about things she likes to see and do. Second, she might go a step farther and create her own version of virtual dating by pointing the person she is chatting with to an interesting Web site and, much as in real dating, experience something together. If so inclined, she might even suggest that they try to play some online games together, explore magical kingdoms, slay dragons, and solve problems. All of which could give them a better understanding of and insight into each other. What matters most is that she make an effort to do things she enjoys with other single people and this way learn more about her compatibility with them.
From Dating Web Sites to Products and Markets
Meanwhile, what does the failure of the online dating market imply about other failures? Fundamentally, the online dating market is a failure of product design.
Allow me to explain. Basically, when a product doesn’t work well for us, it misses the intended mark. Just as online dating sites that try to reduce humans to a set of descriptive words too often fail to make real matches, companies disappoint when they don’t translate what they’re offering into something compatible with the way we think. Take computers, for example. Most of us just want a computer that is reliable, runs fast, and can help us do the thing we want to do. We couldn’t care less about the amount of RAM, processor speed, or bus speed (of course, some people really care about these things), but that’s the way manufacturers describe their computers, not really helping us understand how the experience with a particular computer will feel.
As another example, consider online retirement calculators that are supposedly designed to help us figure out how much to save for retirement. After we enter data about our basic expenses, the calculator tells us that we will need, say, $3.2 million in our retirement account. Unfortunately, we don’t really know what kind of lifestyle we might have with that amount or what we can expect if we have only $2.7 million or $1.4 million (not to mention $540,000 or $206,000). Nor does it help us imagine what it would be like to live to a hundred if we have very little in our savings accounts by the age of seventy. The calculator simply returns a number (mostly out of our reach) that doesn’t translate into anything that we can visualize or comprehend, and in doing so it also doesn’t motivate us to try harder to save more.
Likewise, consider the way insurance companies describe their products in terms of deductibles, limits, and co-pays. What does that really mean when we end up having to get treatment for cancer? What does a “maximum liability” tell us about how much we’ll really be out of pocket if we and other people are badly injured in a car accident? Then there’s that wonderful insurance product called an annuity, which is supposed to protect you against running out of money should you live to be a hundred. Theoretically, buying an annuity means that you will be repaid in the form of a fixed salary for life (essentially, Social Security is a sort of annuity system). In principle, annuities make a lot of sense, but sadly, it’s very difficult to compute how much they are worth to us. Worse, the people who sell them are the insurance indust
ry’s equivalent of sleazy used-car salesmen. (Though I’m sure there are exceptions, I haven’t run into them.) They use the difficulty of determining how much annuities are really worth to overcharge their customers. The result is that most annuities are a rip-off and this very important market doesn’t work well at all.
So how can markets be made more efficient and effective? Here’s an example of social loans: Let’s say you need to scrabble together money for a car. Many companies have now set up social lending constructs that allow families and friends to borrow and lend from each other, which cuts the middlemen (banks) out of the equation, reduces the risk of nonpayment, and provides better interest rates to both the lender and borrower. The companies that manage these loans take no risk and deal with the logistics of the loan behind the scenes. Everyone but the banks benefits.
The bottom line is this: even when markets are not working for us, we are not utterly helpless. We can try to solve a problem by figuring out how a market is not providing the help we expect from it and take some steps to alleviate the problem (creating our own virtual dating experience, lending money to relatives, etc.). We can also try to solve the problem more generally and come up with products that are designed with an eye for meeting the needs of prospective customers. Sadly, but also happily, the opportunities for such improved products and services are everywhere.
Chapter 9
On Empathy and Emotion
Why We Respond to One Person Who Needs Help but Not to Many
Few Americans who were alive and cognizant in 1987 could forget the “Baby Jessica” saga. Jessica McClure was an eighteen-month-old girl in Midland, Texas, who was playing in the backyard at her aunt’s house when she fell twenty-two feet down an abandoned water well. She was wedged in the dark, subterranean crevice for 58½ hours, but the infinitesimally drawn-out media coverage made it seem as if the ordeal dragged on for weeks. The drama brought people together. Oil drillers–cum–rescue workers, neighbors, and reporters in Midland stood daily vigil, as did television viewers around the globe. The whole world followed every inch of progress in the rescue effort. There was deep consternation when rescuers discovered that Jessica’s right foot was wedged between rocks. There was universal delight when workers reported that she’d sung along to the Humpty-Dumpty nursery rhyme that was piped down to her by a speaker lowered into the shaft (an interesting choice, considering the circumstances). Finally, there was the tearful relief when the little girl was finally pulled out of the laboriously drilled parallel shaft.
