Speaking of Psychology - Love and algorithms: The future of dating apps, with Liesel Sharabi, PhD

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

Over the past two decades, dating apps have become the most common way for people to meet a partner. Liesel Sharabi, PhD, director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at Arizona State University, discusses how that shift has changed how people meet and form relationships, whether relationships that start online are more or less likely to succeed, what you can do to avoid dating app burnout, and how developing technologies such as AI and virtual reality could change dating in the future. For transcripts, links and more information, please visit the Speaking of Psychology Homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you're single and looking for love this Valentine's Day, then chances are you're on some dating apps. Over the past two decades, apps and websites have replaced friends, family members, bars, and churches as the most common ways for people to meet a partner. One study from Stanford University found that in 2022, 55% of all new couples met online. That's up from just under 40% in 2017 and only 22% in 2009. Meanwhile, a 2023 Pew Research Center poll found that 3 in 10 U.S. adults of all ages have spent some time on dating websites or apps. So how has the shift to online dating change the way that people meet and form relationships? How might the algorithms that power dating apps and filter our potential partners?

affect who we end up with. Do those algorithms do a good job? And what happens to relationships that start online? Are they more or less likely to work out? If you're on dating apps right now, what can you do to increase your chances of success? What are the biggest mistakes that online daters make? And finally, how might developing technologies

such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality change dating in the future? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Liesel Shirabi. Dr. Shirabi is an associate professor in the Hugh Down School of Human Communication at Arizona State University, where she directs the Relationships and Technology Lab. Dr. Shurabi's research explores how technology is transatlantician. transforming the ways we meet, date, and fall in love.

Much of her work centers around online dating sites and mobile dating apps. She's also interested in the future of dating, including the role of artificial intelligence in facilitating relationships and intimate relationships in augmented and virtual reality. Dr. Shirabi's research has been published in numerous academic journals and featured by Wired, NPR, Time magazine, and many other media outlets. Dr. Shirabi, thank you for joining me. So happy to be here. Thanks for having me on. So I just mentioned that there's a study that found that more than half of couples now meet online. How do you think that's changed the way that people get to know each other and enter relationships?

I mean, one thing that it's really done is help to expand the dating pool. So now you're no longer limited just to the people who you might happen to run into going about your day-to-day routine. You have so many more options than you had previously. And it also means that you're not. that instead of meeting somebody in person, striking up a conversation, you're being introduced to a profile, and you're getting to know someone in a very different way in that sense, evaluating them on, you know, different types of attributes because you have this two-dimensional profile that is standing in place of the actual person that you would ultimately end up meeting. Let's talk about how most dating apps are working right now. What's going on behind the scenes when an app is showing you a series of profiles to consider, how is it, quote, unquote, deciding which potential partners to offer you?

Well, apps do this in different ways. I mean, more recently, they've started to base this primarily on your behaviors. So they look at the profiles that you're swiping on to try to get a sense of your taste. And they also look at the types of people who are swiping on you to try to get a sense of who might be interested. did in you and who would reciprocate if you were to reach out to them. And so they're looking at patterns of swiping behaviors. And specifically, one way that a lot of apps are doing this today is through something called collaborative filtering, where you're swiping on profiles and they're also looking

at people who appear to be swiping on the same types of people, so people who seem like they have similar taste to you. And based on their patterns of behavior, they're making determinations about who you. you might be interested in seeing next. And it's kind of similar to how Netflix recommends movies to you, how Amazon recommends products, where they don't have to know a whole lot about you because they know what people like you typically do,

what their taste typically is, and they're able to use that information to then offer you recommendations. So all that is to say that these days apps don't have to ask who you are and what you want. They can draw these inferences just, based on knowing something about how you behave on the platform. Are these algorithms doing a good job? I mean, how do they compare to, say, a human matchmaker or a friend who says,

hey, I know someone you might like? Yeah. I mean, there isn't a lot of evidence that algorithms are better than humans at trying to decide who you would be interested in. But that being said, there is some evidence that believing that an algorithm might know who you would be compatible with can be really powerful in shaping your behaviors in ways that are likely to lead you to more successful outcomes. So as an example of that, if you're using a dating app where they're doing compatibility matching and they're telling you that the partners that you're

being introduced to are really great for you, really perfect, you might behave differently towards those individuals. So you might feel less uncertain about them. You might reveal more about yourself thinking, this person is someone who I'm really going to hit it off with. And because you're engaging in those behaviors, it can make it more likely that you're going to have good outcomes if you were to meet them face-to-face, that your date's going to be more successful because you've already started this process of establishing a very functional relationship. So it's kind of a classic self-fulfilling prophecy. So even if the algorithms aren't necessarily better than we are at knowing who we're going to be compatible with,

the way that we perceive them and how we engage with them can play a role in making us successful. And is it only compatibility or is it also looking at geographic location or do you have to specify? Yeah. So if you're using a dating app, a lot of apps are based on geographic locations. So it's showing you people who are nearby. And in doing that, they've made this experience more similar to how we've always gotten to know someone face to face, which is by looking around us, looking around in our communities, and seeing who we might be interested in. So they want to make it really easy for people to strike up a conversation and then quickly get off the app and actually go out there and meet somebody and go on a date. So geographic location plays a role in this, but there are other factors that are playing a role as well, including the types of profiles.

that you're swiping on and the types of people who are showing an interest in you in return. Anyone who's used dating apps will tell you that men's and women's experiences tend to be quite different on these platforms. Why is that and what are the different problems that men and women generally have to deal with, at least in the context of heterosexual dating? Yeah. So on a lot of platforms, there is a gender imbalance where you have more male users and you have fewer female users. And so for people who are looking for heterosexual relationships, this can create some really interesting dynamics.

And you end up with these situations where men are maybe getting fewer matches when they reach out to people. They're not getting as many responses because women are feeling overwhelmed. They're getting a lot of attention. They have a lot of people competing for their attention on these platforms. And it can be really difficult to keep up with that. And so you create this environment where potentially some people are putting in a lot of work trying to meet somebody, trying to match with people. And then other people are getting so much attention that they're overwhelmed and they're just not able to keep up.

And so when you look at men and women, they can end up with these fundamentally different experiences on the platform where for some people, it's really expanding their pool. They really feel like they have a lot of options. And for other people, they feel like they're putting it a lot of. lot of time and effort, but it's not actually leading them anywhere. And this is where algorithms can become helpful in trying to make sure that people are being shown profiles of potential partners who are actually going to reciprocate if they were to reach out and who are actually going to be interested because it's a big problem on dating apps. What's the proportion of men to women on most of these apps? Do you know? I don't know. I mean, it would really depend

on the specific platform that somebody is using. And so I don't have any specific numbers in terms of the gender balance, aside from saying that on a lot of them, there does tend to be more male users. But yeah, I don't know. Is that something proprietary that the companies don't want to release? Because if you knew, you might not be playing. Yeah. So much of this is proprietary. I mean, we can make assumptions. We can make inferences based on, you know, people who are using them. but there's only so much we can know without actually having access to some of that proprietary data. What about for people who are looking for same-sex partners, are their experiences different

from people who are looking for opposite sex dates? Yeah, absolutely. And there are also different types of platforms that cater specifically to people who are looking for same-sex partners. So you have the dating apps like Tinder and Hinge and Bumble that cater to really broad demographic of users. And then you also have these niche dating apps, some of them catering specifically to people who are looking for same-sex relationships.

So I think about Grindr, which was actually a precursor to apps that we have today, like Tinder that caters to men who are looking for other men-form relationships with. You have apps like her. So there are specific platforms that are designed to. to facilitate those types of relationships. You've done some research comparing long-term relationships that started online with those that started some other way. What have you found? Is there any difference in relationship quality or divorce rate or any other factors? So 10 years ago, just about 10 years ago, there was a study that came out that compared the marriages of couples that were meeting online to the marriages of couples who were meeting face-to-face.

And what they found was that people who were meeting online were a little bit more satisfied in their relationships. They were a little bit more stable. And so that was a pretty positive outcome. So you would like to think that if you use online dating, maybe that's going to mean that you have a more successful long-term relationship. Not a lot of work has been done in that area since. And so recently, my colleague and I actually collected some data to try to see if those effects, still hold today. So if it is still the case that people who are meeting through online dating are more successful in the long run. And we actually found that the effects were in the opposite

direction. So people who are meeting through online dating were actually a little bit less satisfied in their marriages. They were a little bit less stable, more likely to consider divorce. And these aren't big effects by any means. So these aren't big differences. But at the same time they're noteworthy. And so you might start to think, okay, what could explain that? What's changed in the past 10 years? And one of the big changes that's happened is just the shift from online dating sites to mobile dating apps because we're now about a decade into mobile dating. We're starting to see some of the long-term implications of forming relationships this way. And so it's seeming like perhaps that's playing a role in some of the outcomes that people are

experiencing. And so then you can, you know, think even more about what's different about dating apps in particular. But I mean, the matchmaking process is different. The process that people follow to actually initiate a relationship where you're swiping on profiles that are very much centered around photos rather than self descriptions. And then the fact that you're having to go through lots of profiles, you're meeting lots of people. And you just have lots of offers. And you just have lots of offers. And so it's easy to go back to the dating pool if something doesn't work out or if somebody doesn't exactly meet your expectations. What about the probability of a date turning into marriage, assuming that that's the dater's goal? How to online matches compare to other types of matches in that realm?

Yeah. So the big thing to know about online dating is that not everyone is looking for a committed long-term relationship. and I think this is a big source of frustration for a lot of people, especially people who are interested in commitment because it can be really hard to figure out what people's goals are and to find people whose goals align with your own. And I think it also, there's this mindset and this attitude that comes up in online dating where people kind of feel like

because it's so easy to form relationships, because they have so many options available to them, it can almost start to make relationships feel a little bit disposable in the sense that you might find that you're really hitting it off with someone, but in the back of your mind you might wonder, okay, is somebody better out there? If I just keep swiping, is that going to lead me to someone that's even more perfect than the person I'm interacting with right now? And I compare that to the experience of dating before we had these apps where if you meet someone, you're only meeting so many people who, you might be romantically interested in, just going about your day-to-day routine. So you might give them a chance. And even if they're not perfect, you might still sort of put in the work to see if that relationship can go somewhere. But with dating apps, I think that there is this attitude sometimes that it's about finding

the perfect person as opposed to building a strong relationship with someone despite their flaws. And so you've got people who spend a whole lot of time swiping. and then not, I think, enough time actually trying to build a good relationship with one person that they are committed to. And there's been a lot written about the tendency of younger generations today to pursue perfection in everything. I mean, is that playing a role here? I think that's what I'm hearing you say. Yeah, I mean, I really think it is.

I think that people spend a lot of time. I mean, they go into online dating with this almost wish list. this list of qualities that they're looking for in their perfect partner and they spend a lot of time trying to find it. And you can swipe endlessly in order to do that. And you can find people who are really great. But if your goal is perfection, you're going to spend a lot of time on the apps and probably less time in relationships because no one is perfect. I mean, it's unrealistic to think that that's going to be the outcome of all of this. And so a much, I think, healthier mindset would be finding someone who's interesting to you, someone you're attracted to, who you're willing to put in the work with.

And I think sometimes with dating apps, people lose sight of that because it's just so easy to meet people now and to evaluate them on qualities that sometimes, you know, don't end up mattering in the long run as much as we might think that they would. Do you have other advice for people who are on apps that might maximize their chances of success? I mean, should you limit the amount of time that you spend or how many swipes after 100 people should you stop? I mean, are there tips that you can offer our listeners? Yeah. I mean, I think that people sometimes experience choice overload where they're swiping so much that they start to get overwhelmed. And you get to this point where all of the profiles and the faces start to blur together. And I think that's when you know that you've reached your stopping point.

So it can help to limit how much you're swiping so that you're seriously considering the people in front of you. Instead of just going through them one by one and rolling them out based on things that, again, might not matter so much. I know a lot of people look at things like height. They look at things like what somebody does for living. They look at their hobbies. And it can be really easy to see one thing that you don't like and immediately just swipe left, reject it, move on to the next person. And so I think it helps to really consider that these are, you know, human beings that are much more complex. than what you might be seeing in the profile

and to really think through each person as if they were right in front of you as opposed to falling into that swiping mindset. I also think a lot of these problems can be addressed by getting off the app as well. So spending more time actually using it the way it was intended, which is to introduce you to people and then letting the actual relationship development part

play out offline as opposed to to spending a lot of time messaging back and forth and then meeting and finding that this person maybe wasn't entirely what you expected. And then you also end up back on the apps and back in the dating pool. Yeah. So speaking of what you expected when you meet somebody, what about safety? What about the question of making sure that the person you're meeting really is what he or she says they are and that if you do meet that you're not going to be stalked by somebody for the next six months? Yeah, I mean, I think you always want to make sure that when you're meeting people from dating apps, that you're doing that in a public location, that you tell someone where you're going, that you're smart about it and that you do try to stay safe because dating apps are designed to introduce you to strangers. That's the whole point is to expand your network to introduce you to people who you might not otherwise come into contact with.

And with that does come some safety concerns. I think that also it can help to at least get to know somebody well enough to where you feel comfortable meeting them. So at least exchanging some messages, maybe even going on a video date, getting on a phone call with that person, so that you can try to vet them a little bit more than you might be able to on the app. But at the same time, not waiting so long to where you're following into this pen pal situation of messaging somebody and building up these these big expectations that would be difficult for someone to live up to. Did the pandemic have any impact on people's use of dating apps? Or is it too soon to even say whether we know this?

During the pandemic, some of the data coming from the platforms themselves shows that there was a big uptick in online dating because people were at home. They weren't able or weren't comfortable going out and meeting people. And so you had people spending more time on the apps. and you also had people trying them out who maybe hadn't used them before. And so in addition to that, something else that we saw happen during the pandemic was that a lot of people started experimenting with video dating because you, you know, didn't want to go out and go on a face-to-face date with somebody.

And so video offered an alternative and kind of this step in between messaging somebody and actually putting in the time, the effort to go meet them in person. And so video dating, I mean, it's really a throwback to the 80s when video dating services were also kind of popular. Before we had online dating, people were going on video dates, a different kind of video date. But we saw this again. We saw platforms rolling out video dating features during the pandemic. And I thought that was a really positive step, a step in the right direction. Because when you think about safety concerns, like it does.

let you get to know somebody a little bit better before you meet them. And then it also, it's a way of a meeting that requires a little bit less investment. So you don't have to leave the house. You don't have to go spend money. And so I think for a lot of people, that can be really helpful as a step before meeting in person. Now, when online dating was new back in the early 2000s, there was some stigma around that people were embarrassed to admit that they had. had met online. Does that stigma persist today or has it become so common that people don't mind saying, yeah, yeah, we met each other on an app? So something that's been really surprising to me and pretty interesting is that while this stigma has gone away somewhat, it's also

become much more platform-specific. So I think online dating has become so common where it's not as stigmatized as it was in, say, the 90s when people were less familiar with it. But now we have these stigmas attached to that actual platform that people are using. And this is something that's come up in my research talking to people who are in long-term relationships that they formed online dating, where I've had people tell me that they don't actually tell everyone in their network. They don't tell, you know, family members how they met because they're afraid that they're going to be judged for the platform they were using. So if they used it, app, they're afraid people will think that they were on there just looking to hook up and looking

for something casual. And so there's that kind of stigma that's coming up for people. And so I was surprised that when we're in an era where online dating is the primary way that people are meeting in the U.S., that there's people that are still making up these cover stories about how they met because they're afraid of the judgment that they're going to receive. And so, yeah, it's gotten better in one way, but it's also changed in another where now it's much more about the app that you were using. You've also studied virtual reality dating.

What is a virtual reality date? Is this something that people are doing in real life or are they just doing it in research labs right now? Yeah. I mean, right now I think it's primarily in labs, but we also have some startups that are looking at ways that virtual reality can be come a part of the online dating experience. And so when you think of what a virtual reality date might look like, I would visualize an experience that looks a lot more like meeting face-to-face. And this is kind of the irony in all of this,

that the more technology advances, the more it takes us back to how we've always dated in person. So instead of swiping through profiles and messaging people, you might walk up to somebody in a virtual bar and maybe buy them a drink or strike up a conversation. And so you're once again meeting people based on proximity, people that are virtually in the same vicinity as you, but you can also benefit from all of the advantages of online dating.

Like you might still have access to somebody's profile when you're having a conversation with them in this virtual environment. So you get more information. But at the same time, it feels a little bit more organic. And something that I think, is kind of exciting about this idea of using virtual reality and dating is that you're evaluating people based on what it's like to have a conversation with them, which is very different from how we evaluate people on dating apps. So on an app, you're reading a profile, you're

evaluating them based on that information. But when you have a conversation with somebody, you're paying attention to things like, you know, do they make me laugh? Do I feel like this is a good person? Do I like how they treat me? And, it's just not the same kind of information that you're able to get from a profile. And so I think it could be an exciting direction, but I also think it's a bit of a ways away at this point. So on a VR date, wouldn't you have an avatar and be encountering people's avatar? So you're not even really seeing what they're like, but maybe some idealized idea of what they should be. Yeah. So isn't this kind of false in that sense? I mean, what happens if you meet in real life? And, you know, the person,

doesn't resemble their avatar at all. Yeah. And so it's, I mean, that will be a tricky thing about it. When it comes to avatars, it also gives you a lot more control over how you present yourself. I mean, you can really get creative in terms of what you look like. I mean, in terms of your appearance. And so that could lead to more instances of deception and catfishing or at least more concerns about it.

But again, it's the early days. So we don't really know yet. Now, as we have been saying, dating apps are really popular right now, but there have been a bunch of trend stories lately about how millennials and Jen Ziers are saying that they're sick of them, that they're swearing off online dating, they're deleting their apps. Do you think that the use of dating apps will continue to grow, or are we reaching a point where people are getting burned out and they want to try something different? I think that we are in the burnout era when it comes to dating apps. And when you think about it, we're about 10 years in. Like we're starting to see some long-term outcomes for people who have been on them from the beginning. And some people, you know, they've been on Tinder for the entire time that Tinder has been available

and they haven't been able to find what they're looking for. Same goes for some of the other apps where people at this point have been on there from the beginning and they're getting fed up because they're not able to find whatever drew them to the apps in the first place. And so, I mean, I think it's hard to imagine a future where technology suddenly becomes disconnected from how we date. And I think some of it is people potentially romanticizing a time when dating apps didn't exist. I mean, when you look at especially Gen Z, they have grown up in an environment where dating apps, social media, have always been available to them. So the idea of just meeting somebody face to face without the help of technology, I mean, that hasn't been a reality for a lot of people because it's always been a way that they've

been able to form relationships. And so I think some people are kind of nostalgic for that a little bit. And I also think they're frustrated with the dating app experience. I do think that there is change on the horizon when it comes to online dating. and especially when I look at AI and how that might start to play a role in this landscape, I think that, you know, we're at a really pivotal moment with online dating. At the same time, I don't think it's going to go away. I could see it transforming in the next couple of years, especially because of advances in AI.

In what ways? What do you envision? Will we all just create AI dates and, you know, they'll be the people we want and love and we can just make them, what we want them to be and fall in love with them and live with them forever. Yeah. I mean, what I'm hoping that future looks like is one where people are relying more on AI for facilitating relationships and less,

less for actually being the relationship partner that they're looking for. But people are already like using chat GPT to help them come up with opening lines to help them create their profiles. So they're already relying on AI as almost a date coach. someone, something to help them be a little bit better in the dating environment. That's a cheat. That's a big cheat. At opening line, you need AI to tell you how to do that.

Yeah. And then you think about, okay, so then what happens when you get off the app, right? If you start using AI to help you write all of your messages, eventually you're going to get to the point where you can't use it anymore and you might come across as being very different compared to how you portrayed yourself on the app. So I think apps are going to have to figure out exactly how much they want to allow people to rely people to rely on AI. And so I think that's one way that it might play a role. And then there's also startups that are experimenting with ways to use AI in matchmaking.

And a lot of apps are doing this actually. But some of their ideas, they get pretty creative. I mean, some are talking about having people train AI to represent them and to go on dates for them. So instead of having to swipe on your own, you've now taught an AI to go out and interact on your behalf and to come back with some partners he might be interested in. So, I mean, there's so many different ways that I think these platforms are looking at incorporating AI and the experience. And I mean, I think it's hard to imagine that this isn't going to play a big role. It's just a matter of figuring out exactly what is the best way to utilize this. to make online dating better for people.

What got you interested in this line of research? Yeah. I mean, I'm really, really intrigued by the potential of using technology to help people find love and to really help people make better decisions when it comes to their choice of a romantic partner. I think there's so much potential here. And at the same time, I also think that some people do have. have really negative experiences when they use technology for dating. It can be really frustrating for a lot of people. And so I think there's a lot of room for improvement. But I'm really excited

about the possibility of how we might use technology to help people facilitate better connections and to have happier relationships. So what are you working on now? What are your big research projects on the horizon? Yeah. So one study that I'm working on currently is looking at dating at burnout, the experience of burnout over time, who's most susceptible to it? Because I think we are at that point where people are feeling frustrated. And so trying to figure out, okay, why is this experience not working for some people? Why are some people not successful in finding what they're looking for? Because I've also been looking at long-term relationships that come out of online dating and people's success stories. And, you know, they have such different

experiences where some people meet the love of their life. I mean, it changes their life. The fact that they used online dating and they found someone they wouldn't otherwise meet. And then for other people, they've been on the apps for years and they've spent so much time and money and gotten nowhere. And so trying to figure out exactly what makes some people successful in the apps while others really struggle. Well, Dr. Sharabi, I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been really interesting. Thanks a lot. Thank you for having me on. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.w.combeingof Psychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a

review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condyenne. Thank you for listening for the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.