In the span of a few decades, online dating went from the fringe to the mainstream; now, more than half of Americans say relationships formed through online dating can be just as successful as those forged in real life.
As of , meeting online was the most popular way for couples to find each other, according to a Stanford study. With such a large pool of singles, there's a cottage industry of sorts for online dating advice. Some singles even hire ghostwriters for the job of penning their profiles. Now, science has turned its eye towards the study of how to stand out in online dating. A new study in the journal PLOS One offers insights into how one can create the most successful dating profile. The name of the game, it turns out, is originality.
More specifically, they enjoyed traits such as intelligence, a sense of humor and creativity. Online daters were particularly drawn to profiles where the language itself stood out from the generic. In addition, the study analyzed what exactly a profile's text needed to do to be perceived as "original.
For instance, profiles that used clever metaphors received highly favorable responses, as did those which included concrete and easily verifiable self-disclosures.
The corresponding author for the study, Dr. Tess van der Zanden, told Salon by email that one limitation was that most of the subjects were elderly. This is because we collaborated with the dating platform 50PlusMatch, which is a specific platform for active people of 50 years or older. Given this sample, we can thus not generalize our findings and draw any conclusions about general effects of perceived profile text originality on impression formation across all ages, as the participant's mean age was Want more health and science stories in your inbox?
