Finding love includes no ‘Science bit’
I’d love to know how some of the biggest dating companies out there are operating so successfully when basing their whole advertising campaigns around tests and questionnaires that claim to find your perfect mate.
These have to be flawed in both science and the very nature of relationships.
Firstly the science bit. Any scientific test needs to be proved as reliable (submitted to the scientific community for rigorous scrutiny) and as a valid measure (in this case prove that relationships set up by tests are subsequently successful) before it is generally accepted.
According to Robert Epstein of Scientific American such tests are never scrutinised in such a way.
It’s suggested that one leading online dating company offers, in truth a 500/1 chance of marrying a compatible match. This company offers around 1.5 matches a month. This means if you dated every match you’d go on 346 first dates and take 19 years to reach a 50% chance of finding your fiancé.
Add this to the fact there is no guarantee that marriage would be a success.
Now lets look at it from a relationship point of view. These ‘tests’ generally focus on pairing people based on similar character traits or interests and eliminating others.
Think about your own relationships, those of your friends and those of your family. You’ll almost certainly see in some cases opposites really do attract and matching people based on interests and characteristics is no guarantee that they will get on.
Furthermore, the process of elimination makes it feasible the one person who would turn out to be perfect for you could be lost based on a decision made by a piece of computer software.
Thankfully it seems I’m not the only one with this viewpoint. psychologist Larry D. Rosen of California State University, Dominguez Hills states, “In our studies only 30 percent of the people say they use [online tests] at all, and most of those people find them ridiculous.”
All this begs the question why are these sites doing so well when their users have so little faith in their tests?
