If your quiz analysis indicates a high tendency of you falling victim to romance scams, you've come to the right place to discuss today’s topic: Does online dating make us lie and cheat more or even become a racist?
By exploring the digital issues associated with online dating, I’ve started an account on a dating app from Taiwan named Goodnight to get first hand experience as an app user. After spending two months saying “Goodnight”s to a lot of strangers, I’ve come to the conclusion that online dating is (well mostly but not all) anything but authentic. Why? Check out the three observations below!
1. We lie
Hey! I’m not the only person creating an online identity with a fake profile picture. Even if you’re using a real picture, well who doesn’t make use of a photo filter or photoshop our flaws with just a click?
According to Ward (2016), dating apps encourage users to filter in profiles predominantly based on the attractiveness of the profile pictures.
2. We cheat
As a young girl (who pretended to be) at 22, I was approached by different guys ranging from 15 to 50, aka from a teen in puberty to a father with kids looking for excitement outside of his marriage. It’s fairly common to encounter those who're looking for “partner in crime” mentally, and I found it surprisingly easy to lure male app users to cheat physically despite their occupied status as engaged or married (!!).
Computers in Human Behavior (2020) research results suggested that people's perceived success on a dating app was positively associated with their intention to commit infidelity through self-perceived desirability, and negatively associated with their intention to commit infidelity through perceived amount of available partners.
3. Do we become racist without knowing?
We all love the filter function on dating apps, and with an advanced algorithm nowadays, the big data collected through our apps might even know us better than we know ourselves!
“After you’ve interacted with three people, that’s enough data for the algorithm to ignore what you said you want”, said algorithm scientist Luiz Pizzato.
Does asking “Anything but black/fag” sound okay? It’s absolutely normal to have preferences on a desired partner, but are statements like “I only date white dudes” or “I only do Asian girlfriends” ust a preference or making you a racist? (Sorry as an Asian girl I didn’t feel that as a compliment…).
In real life, you’ll have to interact with another person before you could reject their interest in you. Do the filtering functions encourage us to label and screen out others virtually without the need of a sincere conversation? And would hate speech occur commonly in online dating without consequences?
What constitutes an "authentic" representation of who and how we really are? Join our forum to share your thoughts!
References:
Ward, J. (2016). What are you doing on tinder? impression management on a matchmaking mobile app. Information, Communication & Society, 20(11), 1644–1659. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1252412
Alexopoulos, C., Timmermans, E., & McNallie, J. (2020). Swiping more, committing less: Unraveling the links among dating app use, dating app success, and intention to commit infidelity. Computers in Human Behavior, 102, 172–180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.08.009
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