Gemma Spake

Means that actually the level of choice ends up being suffocating.

Actually, there is this really interesting 2012 article from the researcher Eli Finkel and also their colleagues.

And they look at how online dating, because of how many choices they offer, actually reduces three-dimensional people, four-dimensional, five-dimensional people.

It reduces our robust personhood into a two-dimensional display of information or a two-dimensional character.

This actually reduces how good we are at choosing who we'd click with.

Dating apps promote this assessment-oriented mindset where we kind of fall into the role of assessor and maybe unintentionally objectify potential partners.

And if we start viewing someone as an object rather than as a real living, breathing, feeling human, that is the danger.

It actually reduces the likelihood that we want to commit to even getting to know that person because to us, we're seeing so many people constantly, they just lose all dimension.

In studies, researchers have found that people often

They reject those on dating apps that in person they would psychologically be most compatible with.

And they do that for really, really small things like they had too many pictures with their friends.

I didn't like his shirt.

She had two selfies instead of one.

And we do this and we've all done this.

We do this because we have so many choices on dating apps.

We have to come up with these like silly, arbitrary, shallow little rules just so that we can process such a vast amount of information.

We actually end up eliminating lots of really good matches because those rules, they don't make any sense.

They're just us trying to figure out the system.

All of this is gamifying the mechanics of dating, which makes it both unproductive to begin with because we don't even really make good choices, but also addictive because it is unproductive.

A huge reason dating apps are addictive is because they provide intermittent, unpredictable reward, which is essentially the principle behind operant conditioning, which is the principle behind dating.