If personality psychology holds water, I would expect dating sites to use it and produce better results than Traditional Romance. Does it? From the outside looking in, it looks like it does.
It would also be useful in selecting dorm room compatibility, which I can tell you from the inside looking out does not work at all or isn’t being used. I wouldn’t expect it to be used in this context, though. No money in it.
“To date, there is no compelling evidence that any online dating matching algorithm actually works,” Finkel observes. “If dating sites want to claim that their matching algorithm is scientifically valid, they need to adhere to the standards of science, which is something they have uniformly failed to do. In fact, our report concludes that it is unlikely that their algorithms can work, even in principle, given the limitations of the sorts of matching procedures that these sites use.”
I don’t know if any of the dating sites they reviewed use a similar system to OkCupid (users answer questions and also pick how they want matches to answer those questions and how important they are to them,) but I don’t think OkCupid was included in that study. The author wrote that the matching algorithms of the companies they reviewed are proprietary, and were not shared with the researchers, but OkCupid’s matching algorithm is publicly available.
Perhaps by “work” they meant “do better than letting people choose solely based on reading a short essay and seeing a picture,” although that sounds difficult to make precise. Maybe just “do better than random.” We might have to wait until they publish.
Again, it’s the “even in principle” I was objecting to. Picking people at random can in principle do better than letting people choose solely based on reading a short essay and seeing a picture. And uniformly random algorithm A can in principle do better than uniformly random algorithm B.
Saying something isn’t possible “even in principle” specifically means that it cannot happen in any logically possible world—that’s the entire difference between saying “even in principle” and leaving it out. It can’t even accidentally win.
I don’t think OKCupid contains a good way of tracking long-term romantic success once a relationship escapes from the site, but it certainly has the data to correlate any one of several personality metrics with length of correspondence, which strikes me as a half-decent proxy: there’s a huge library of personality tests on the site, including some well-known ones like the MBTI and the Big 5. OKTrends has almost certainly touched on this before, although you’d probably have to apply a lot of logical glue yourself to get a theory to stick together properly.
OKC’s primary metric, however, relies on self-selected answers to a large pool of crowdsourced questions. If there’s been any academic research done in that exact space I’m not aware of it, but it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to view correlations between match metrics and actual romantic success as answering the question “how well do people know their own romantic preferences?”—or conversely to see academic answers to that question as informing OKC’s methodology.
If personality psychology holds water, I would expect dating sites to use it and produce better results than Traditional Romance. Does it? From the outside looking in, it looks like it does.
It would also be useful in selecting dorm room compatibility, which I can tell you from the inside looking out does not work at all or isn’t being used. I wouldn’t expect it to be used in this context, though. No money in it.
Contrary evidence:
I don’t know if any of the dating sites they reviewed use a similar system to OkCupid (users answer questions and also pick how they want matches to answer those questions and how important they are to them,) but I don’t think OkCupid was included in that study. The author wrote that the matching algorithms of the companies they reviewed are proprietary, and were not shared with the researchers, but OkCupid’s matching algorithm is publicly available.
That’s a rather strong claim. Matching people up completely at random can work in principle.
Perhaps by “work” they meant “do better than letting people choose solely based on reading a short essay and seeing a picture,” although that sounds difficult to make precise. Maybe just “do better than random.” We might have to wait until they publish.
Again, it’s the “even in principle” I was objecting to. Picking people at random can in principle do better than letting people choose solely based on reading a short essay and seeing a picture. And uniformly random algorithm A can in principle do better than uniformly random algorithm B.
Saying something isn’t possible “even in principle” specifically means that it cannot happen in any logically possible world—that’s the entire difference between saying “even in principle” and leaving it out. It can’t even accidentally win.
This week’s issue of The Economist has a summary of the scientific evidence behind the popular Internet dating websites.
I don’t think OKCupid contains a good way of tracking long-term romantic success once a relationship escapes from the site, but it certainly has the data to correlate any one of several personality metrics with length of correspondence, which strikes me as a half-decent proxy: there’s a huge library of personality tests on the site, including some well-known ones like the MBTI and the Big 5. OKTrends has almost certainly touched on this before, although you’d probably have to apply a lot of logical glue yourself to get a theory to stick together properly.
OKC’s primary metric, however, relies on self-selected answers to a large pool of crowdsourced questions. If there’s been any academic research done in that exact space I’m not aware of it, but it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to view correlations between match metrics and actual romantic success as answering the question “how well do people know their own romantic preferences?”—or conversely to see academic answers to that question as informing OKC’s methodology.