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Is online dating helping you screen and sort for true love, or is it turning you into a jam idiot?
Last time, I mentioned a recent Wall Street Journal article [1] about the faulty premises plaguing online dating. In the article, Lehrer zooms over a hodgepodge of recent research punch lines, making the point that “love matching algorithms,” the bread-and-butter of some popular online dating sites, teeter on a foundation of wafer-thin alchemy rather than science.
About half-way through the article, he slows down to focus on one problematic premise in particular: the idea that choosing a dating partner is a rational, comparison-shopping-type process, where more information and choices lead to better decisions. Lehrer mentions a famous jam experiment to underscore the claim that this logical mindset might distort our natural lover-picking process, turning us from intuitive love-detectors into checklist-laden “jam idiots.”
What’s a jam idiot? I’m borrowing this enjoyable catchphrase from Malcolm Gladwell, who also wrote about the jam experiment in his best-seller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. In 1991, Drs. Wilson and Schooler published the results of a fascinating study [2] in which they demonstrated that introspecting about jam actually reduces the quality of preferences and decisions. The researchers borrowed the first, eleventh, twenty-fourth, thirty-second, and forty-fourth jams, as ranked by a Consumer Reports panel of jam experts, and set out to see how college students, conspicuously lacking in jam-expertise, would rank them. (Let’s just pause and reflect on a world in which one can rise to the level of jam expert…) The students clumsily swapped the 11th and 1st jams, and the 32nd and 44th jams, but overall, their preferences corresponded with the experts’ at r=.55.
Here comes the awesome part. Wilson and Schooler then asked a second student group to rank the jams, but required them to produce written explanations enumerating their reasons for each preference, assisted by, of course, a jam-trait questionnaire. The researchers forced the students to think logically about jam, a substance normally judged by a non-logical, instinctual sort of “yum” or “yuck” response. Once they turned jam decisions into a heady analysis of things like texture and seeds and sugar content, students got all muddled about which ones they liked, and the correlation between expert and student preferences plummeted to dismal r=.11. A veritable jam disaster. As Gladwell says, “by making people think about jam, Wilson and Schooler turned them into jam idiots.”
This experiment clearly points out the downside of reducing the jam-ranking process into a logical, sum-of-its-parts sort of process. Ultimately, though, the WSJ is also suggesting that our preferences for jam and new dates occupy the same decision-making corner of the brain. Is that true?
I’m not sure that it is. I want to be convinced that the imposition of logic and information into the early phase of dating really does distort our selection process. I still haven’t seen a study that demonstrates a qualitative difference in long-term dating outcomes between people whose attention is drawn to the articulation of what they want in a partner and why, vs. people who aren’t asked to explain their dating preferences. After all, that shift in perception was the problem created by the jam questionnaires. Ideally, I’d like to see a study that prompts the same people to use these two different processes at different times, and then compares the results. (I recently came across an analysis by Eli Finkel et. al that claims to have looked at this question—stay tuned for an upcoming series.)
This blog has also reviewed some research showing that our pre-date ideal personality preferences don’t predict whom we’ll actually be attracted to in a lab setting or at a speed-dating event, which suggests that we don’t fully understand what we’re looking for. But, those same preferences did predict which couples stayed committed over the long-term, so maybe there was something to them. (See 4-part series: “How You Talk Yourself Into Dating the Wrong Person.” You can use my handy-dandy search bar if you want, scroll down on right.)
I like to think that we use both our brain and our gut when making long-term love decisions. Likely, the gut-part will always be hard to incorporate into online dating introductory algorithms.
For today, I’ll leave you with one intriguing thought. I mentioned last time that I’m working on a book about love and relationships in China. It’s been quite the adventure, and along the way, I’ve been struck by a big difference between our cultures. If a Chinese person is telling me about their girlfriend or boyfriend, and I ask a perfectly normal American question, “so, what attracted you to this person?”, I usually get a blank stare, or an answer like, “I don’t know, I just liked her.” One 25 year-old single man summed it up well. He said, “in China, we don’t need these kinds of reasons. We can just love.”
[1] Lehrer, J. (2012, March 16). The Web’s Cockeyed Cupids: Methodical matchmaking is no match for human touch. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com
[2] Wilson, T. and Schooler, J. (1991) Thinking too much: Introspection can reduce the quality of preferences and decisions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(2), 181-192.
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