Psychology of Love and Relationships in the Digital Age | Pinar Yildirim

The Impact of Online Dating Platforms

Dan Loney: In the digital age that we live in, even dating has found its place with various web sites for people to potentially connect in a way different than, maybe historically, we know that it has been the case. But how have those sites impacted things like marriages, and the outcomes of those unions? Wharton professor Pinar Yildirim has been part of a group researching these components in a brand new study just released, and she joins us right now. Pinar, great to talk to you again. How are you?

Pinar Yildirim: I’m great, Dan. Thanks for having me.

Loney: Just in general, these sites are obviously growing in usage. So understanding the types of impact that they are having, that’s a very important component, kind of a logical next step to understand just how much impact they’re having.

Yildirim: Yes, absolutely. The impact of online dating apps, online dating platforms, have been massive if you look at the technologies through which people meet. In fact, if you were to just go back about 20 years ago, online dating apps would be considered pretty much a stigma. Fast forward another 10, 11 years, around 2011, online dating platforms have taken over as the majority way through which people meet and couples are formed. In fact, in the United States today, about 50% of couples are formed through online dating platforms. So it’s important to understand the effects of these platforms on, especially, how relationships are formed, and how the relationships might come to an end.

Loney: Take us through the research and how you went about it.

Yildirim: Yeah. We got curious, naturally, about the effects of these platforms on what kind of relationships are formed, what the platform’s impacts are on marriage and divorce rates, as well as some health outcomes. We collected data from the majority of the online dating platforms going back to about 2002. Again, focusing first on the platforms that might have primarily operated through desktop, and then later on focusing on the mobile platforms, mobile apps.

Loney: How important is it to make that differentiation between what we saw maybe two decades ago, when we were basically living on our computers [on] a desktop, to now where we are, where the digital, our smartphones, are so important to us in our lives?

Yildirim: It’s important because we have seen significant changes as we went from the desktop platforms to mobile phones, where we have a very limited, small screen. I think the important question one needs to ask is, especially compared to the offline methods of dating, how did these new technologies change the way people interact with each other? And how does the desktop version, desktop technology of meeting others, differ from the mobile technology of meeting romantic partners?

From an economic perspective, we have identified at least three ways through which we can think of these technologies to differ from the offline world. Of course, one is the size of the pool of individuals that you might be able to reach out to through these platforms, relative to the offline world. If you’re only constrained in terms of meeting others in a real world, that’s going to reduce the number of people that you could interact with, and the types of people that you can interact with. You typically will be much more likely to meet individuals who might be nearby you, and who might be much more similar to you. Whereas, of course, with the desktop platforms first, and later on with the mobile apps, we have dramatically expanded the pool size of who we can meet, and the number of people we can meet.

It has both positive and negative effects. On the one hand, expanding the number of people that you can meet just creates the opportunity of meeting someone you might like, who’s not necessarily in your immediate social circle. But as we start to increase the pool size even further, especially in the mobile world, where we have virtually endless numbers of potential candidates that we can meet, that’s going to effectively, ultimately, reflect on the likelihood of a match. The likelihood of you meeting someone who will also meet you and like you back. And as a result, actually increasing the pool size can have a negative impact on the match, the likelihood of finding and forming a positive relationship.

A second factor is the noise, or the potential information that you can identify about the individuals that you are meeting with. Even though we could meet an endless number of people, the important information, the amount of true information that we can gather about these individuals, is going to be fairly limited, especially in the mobile world, where we have very limited, shorter profiles. The number of information pieces, the amount  of the information that you can consume about a single individual is quite limited. As we went from the offline world into a desktop world, even though we could gather, potentially, more information about individuals in a short period of time, as we move back to the mobile world, that information has significantly shrunk. So now, we are looking at a potentially noisier world, in terms of gathering information about people.

At the same time, a third factor. This is how much time or how much effort we have to put into […] trying to gather information about individuals or trying to sort through profiles. In real life, if you wanted to meet, I don't know, 10, 20 people in a single day, that would be a very costly thing to do. Going, meeting, exerting effort to get to learn about these individuals. In the desktop world as well as the mobile world, this has dramatically gone down. The cost and effort. In fact, in the mobile world, this has simply become a finger act. Just a simple swipe of trying to interact and learn about profiles. Those factors play a role when it comes to shaping relationships, and those are the things that we try to address in our research.

How Platforms Change Dating Behavior

Loney: When you’re trying to meet somebody, you want to get to know them as well as you can. Part of getting to know them are their behaviors. I’m wondering if people’s behaviors, when you go from the desktop to the mobile, have advanced or adjusted as we’ve moved through the years as well.

Yildirim: Some people’s behaviors might have changed, and it might have changed in response to a number of different factors. Of course, the design of these platforms have changed as we moved from desktop to mobile. In the desktop era, we have seen much more information. When I looked at the profiles, typically you had many different pieces of information. People could write long essays about themselves, go into details about their personality, what they are looking for. And that created, perhaps, a more information-full environment. That might have changed how you interact with someone. If you can read and if you can learn a lot about somebody, of course you might be much more likely to go into maybe an interaction, because you feel more comfortable.

In the mobile world, now our attention is simply confined to this small screen that we have. And whatever we could consume in that small screen was practically the information that these apps demanded from us. They did not give the opportunity to consumers, or they did not necessarily ask consumers, to fill in these very long profiles about themselves. They made it easier for people to easily look at profiles, but at the same time, they reduced the amount of information that one can present about themselves. As a result of that, you will expect it’s normal to anticipate that the interactions between individuals are naturally going to change. And in a mobile world, it might have disproportionately focused on some of the small pieces of information that became a little more salient. Maybe, for instance, the image of the person, or the educational background of the individual, or the job profile of the individual, as these are commonly the type of information that are made a little more salient, compared to some of the other information.

Loney: Is there a difference in the behaviors when you’re talking about who you’re connected with? The sex of the person you’re connecting with, male versus female?

Yildirim: In terms of the behaviors or the interactions, the outcomes that we can observe, we do not have data on the gender of the individuals. What we know is that when we look at just purely usage, we are able to observe that there are disproportionately more males on dating platforms, compared to females. Almost an 80-20 % ratio. This is something that, again, when you look at at least the anecdotal studies and evidence, you will typically see these statistics also confirmed.

But […] one of the outcomes that we looked at was how relationship formation, or the type of couples that are formed, look like as online dating and dating platforms become more prevalent. We looked at, for instance, the idea of a female and a male, again, in a heterosexual couple, how the characteristics of the husband and how the characteristics of the wife look like in regions where online dating was much more prevalent.

One of the things that we have seen was that despite the fact that over many, many decades, we have seen increasing examples, increasing evidence of sorting in marriage formation. What do I mean by that? We have seen, over the years, more and more marriages where the wife and the husband would have similar educational profiles. They would have, also, more similar employment profiles. For instance, more and more couples with people employed. We’ve seen, actually, that with online dating, this trend is not necessarily followed. A defying trend emerges from the couples that seem to be formed, more likely coming from the online dating environment. […] We have seen lesser sorting in education, where women seem to now be more comfortable marrying individuals who have lesser education, lower, maybe. A degree lower. We have seen, also, more and more formation of couples where both parties are not necessarily in the labor force. We do see fewer dual-earner couples coming out of the dating profiles. So that reflects a degree of asymmetry between the experiences of men and women, even though we do not observe exactly how these differences are reflected when individuals are engaging with others on the dating platforms.

Loney: Having done this research now, is there a next logical step that you would like to take this research, going down the road?

Yildirim: There are many questions that we still don’t have answers to. We have answers to some questions about marriage. We have answers to some questions about the potential health outcomes. For instance, we observed that, especially in the mobile era, marriages are declining in regions where online dating has become more prevalent. Partially as a result of the decline in marriages, we also know that we’ve also seen that divorces are declining. That was not necessarily the case when I looked at online dating in the desktop era. In the early days of online dating, it seemed like there are disproportionately more older users, who seemed to be driving higher levels of divorce.

What we would like to understand in some sense is, for instance, decomposing this effect of declining marriages. What does that really mean? Do we see, potentially, a delay in the marriage? Do we see couples becoming maybe more skeptical of getting into a marriage, or forming relationships that may not necessarily resolve to a marriage? And then, also, the implications of this. Just because marriages are declining, that doesn't mean people are less happy, or they are not necessarily feeling good about their relationship outcomes. We don’t, unfortunately, have right now the data to be able to link the marriage and divorce outcomes to people’s well-being, and how they feel about themselves, how they feel about their relationship status. We’d love to be able to also have additional evidence, additional information, additional findings related to how the marriage and divorce outcomes are reflecting on people’s happiness.