In a large-scale experiment conducted through a major North
American online dating website, a team of management scholars from Canada, the
U.S. and Taiwan examined the impact of a premium feature: anonymous browsing.
Out of 100,000 randomly selected new users, 50,000 were given free access to
the feature for a month, enabling them to view profiles of other users without
leaving telltale digital traces.
The researchers expected the anonymity feature to lower social
inhibitions -- and apparently it did. Compared to the control group, users with
anonymous browsing viewed more profiles. They were also more likely to check
out potential same-sex and interracial matches.
Surprisingly, however, users who browsed anonymously also
wound up with fewer matches (defined as a sequence of at least three messages
exchanged between users) than their non-anonymous counterparts.
This was
especially true for female users: those with anonymous browsing wound up with
an average of 14% fewer matches. Why?
Women don’t like to send personal messages to initiate
contact, explains Jui Ramaprasad, an assistant professor of information systems
at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management.
In other words, she
says, “We still see that women don’t make the first move.” Instead, they tend
to send what the researchers call a “weak signal.”
“Weak signaling is the ability to visit, or ‘check out,’ a
potential mate’s profile so the potential mate knows the focal user visited,”
according to the study.
“The offline ‘flirting’ equivalents, at best, would be
a suggestive look or a preening bodily gesture such as a hair toss to one side
or an over-the-shoulder glance, each subject to myriad interpretations and
possible misinterpretations contingent on the perceptiveness of the players
involved.
"Much less ambiguity exists in the online environment if the focal
user views another user’s profile and leaves a visible train in his ‘Recent
Visitors’ list.”
Men often take the cue. “Men send four times the number of
messages that women do,” says co-author Akhmed Umyarov, an assistant professor
at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. “So the
anonymity feature doesn’t change things so much for men.”
Implications beyond online dating
Experiments of this sort could be used in a range of
online-matching platforms to help understand how to improve the consumer
experience – though it’s important that the experiments be done ethically, the
researchers say.
“Even though people are willing to pay to become anonymous in
online dating sites, we find that the feature is detrimental to the average
users,” says Professor Ravi Bapna, co-author and the Carlson Chair in Business
Analytics and Information Systems at Minnesota.
”Professional social networks,
such as LinkedIn, also offer different levels of anonymity, but user behavior
and the underlying psychology in these settings is very different from that of
romantic social networks.”
.
As with many academic research projects, the idea for this experiment stemmed partly from serendipity.
.
As with many academic research projects, the idea for this experiment stemmed partly from serendipity.
“I happened to know a senior guy at an online dating site,”
Ramaprasad explains.
“Since he knew that I studied online behavior, he
suggested, ‘Why don’t you study this?’” The site, referred to in the study by
the fictitious name of monCherie.com, is one of the largest online dating
websites in North America.
The study could lay the groundwork for further academic
analysis of online dating sites.
“We expect future research to examine in more
depth the issue of match quality and long-term outcomes as they relate to
marriage, happiness, long-term relationships, and divorce,” the researchers
conclude.
www.pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2301
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