Social Psychology Perspective on Dating and its Relation to Dating Services

Dating services will be judged by their success in bringing together compatible relationship partners. Thus a dating service has a responsibility to its customers to effectively facilitate this matching. This I take as the fundamental task of an honest dating service. The question of what the psychology literature on human dating can offer dating service designers is a question of how their research results can be applied to this fundamental task. This approach is particularly critical in the presence of more profitdriven dating websites and a growing suspicion in social literature that purveyors of dating services seek to exploit people’s fears and vulnerabilities about dating and romance by offering easy answers and fake scientific “solutions” [BBBS00]. There is a body of work in social psychology about human dating behavior (frequently called human mating behavior). This literature addresses many common beliefs about dating and romance. There have been studies investigating what predicts romance, if it is true that people tend to marry people like themselves, or if it is true that “opposites attract.” Other work has investigated the existence of an irrational “love at first sight” phenomenon. Still more work addresses the qualities of a relationship that make it either succeed or fail. While a survey of the full literature on human mating behavior is beyond the scope of this paper, we endeavor to address the broad trends that have implications for the designers of online dating sites.