Don't Waste Time with Dating App Filters, How to Find Love
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The last show with David Cooper. Procrastinate your life away with us. Dating apps, they're funky. They're like a weird shopping exercise. You swipe, you filter, you reject, you repeat, all in the name of being compatible with someone. But what if this whole system is broken and attraction isn't that predictable? Well, that's what we're going to discuss here with Paul Eastwick, a psychology professor at UC Davis. Check out his book, Bonded by Evolution, The New Science of Love and Connection. Paul, what a joy it is to have you. Thank you so much for having me back, David.
What are the limitations of dating app filters?
These dating apps, I feel like they're out competing each other in filtering, you know, like age, weight, hair color, political preference. Like somehow if you can just filter down your perfect match to this exact, I don't know, script that you'll just find love. Why is this wrong?
Yeah, so this is not my favorite feature of the apps. And look, the apps do introduce people to folks that you never would have had a chance to meet before. But where I think they falter is where they provide people a sense that you can cull that sometimes very vast pool to something more manageable that looks exactly like what you would have drawn up for yourself on paper. That there's the perfect partner waiting out there for you who has a list of attributes along the lines of what you describe. But the challenge is that when we try to study this topic experimentally, when we actually look at people's filters and whether or not they'd actually end up liking those folks more once they meet face to face, it kind of ends up being more or less of a coin flip.
So in general, the filter is not my favorite feature of what the apps are doing.
We've spoken about this in the past, but let's reiterate it. How good are we? How good am I? How good are you at actually knowing what we're attracted to? How good are we at saying these filters will produce our perfect partner versus people who have the perfect partner? Did they match their checklist, I guess, is what I'm trying to ask.
Yeah, we don't do all that well. Now, look, if I were to ask you to draw up your perfect partner, you would certainly sit here and list some attributes and many of those would be positive attributes. But the problem is that the attributes you're coming up with, it's not like they're uniquely special to you. And the thought experiment that I like to describe, we have real experiments that fit this. But the thought experiment here is, well, imagine what would happen if, you know, here you are using your filters and all of a sudden we have, you know, some sort of Freaky Friday situation where my filters get mapped on top of your filters and your filters get mapped on top of mine. And now the women I'm seeing are the women that David would have liked.
Well, the thing is, ultimately, it probably wouldn't have mattered. I would have been just as likely to like the women once I meet them face to face if I'd been using your filters rather than mine. So, yeah, some of them are filtering for quote unquote good things, but they're not like idiosyncratically appealing to the user.
Well, let's talk about these filters, things like hobbies, someone's politics, their personality, their hair color, their age, all of these things. Why doesn't that predict whether I'm going to click with someone? Why am I potentially likely to like someone whose hobbies are so different than me, even though you might say, hey, they have nothing in common?
Yeah, it feels so intuitive that we should click with people when we have more rather than fewer things in common. But I think what we underappreciate is that people, especially when they're having face-to-face conversations, we largely start with the assumption that we would like these conversations to go well. We would like them to be pleasant rather than unpleasant. We would like them to be smooth. And what we're often trying to do, and this is even true on awkward first dates, is we're trying to find points of connection. Now, it can be challenging if you don't find anything to talk about with somebody else.
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