Spending time on dating apps, I know from experience, can make you a little paranoid. When you swipe and swipe and nothing’s working out, it could be that you’ve had bad luck. It could be that you’re too picky. It could be—oh God—that you simply don’t pull like you thought you did. But sometimes, whether out of self-protection or righteous skepticism of corporate motives, you might think: Maybe the nameless faces who created this product are conspiring against me to turn a profit—meddling in my dating life so that I’ll spend the rest of my days alone, paying for any feature that gives me a shred of hope.
The gnawing suspicion is a common one. In one 2024 study, researchers analyzed more than 7,000 online reviews of Tinder and interviewed 30 Tinder users, and found that many people believe that dating sites are messing with their profile’s visibility, manipulating their matches, and knowingly providing options that aren’t good fits. The study’s co-authors called it the “conflict of interest theory”: that dating-app companies (which want customers) have interests fundamentally at odds with those of many dating-app users (specifically, those who want to find someone and delete the app ASAP). The idea was so familiar to the researchers whom I interviewed while reporting this article that I hardly needed to explain it.
Some wariness of dating sites is understandable. One recent investigation found that, more and more, apps are nudging people to pay for perks—visibility boosts, unlimited likes—marketed as tools for finding love. Last year, a class-action lawsuit argued that Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, and several other apps, locks its users into “a perpetual pay-to-play loop” at the expense of “customers’ relationship goals.” (“We actively strive to get people on dates every day and off our apps,” Match Group responded in a statement. “Anyone who states anything else doesn’t understand the purpose and mission of our entire industry.” In December, a judge sent the case to arbitration.)
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God help us, I thought to myself at this point in the search: Are dating apps all run by institutions that people famously do not trust? Then I heard of another type of nonprofit player, one that many Americans also dislike but perhaps not quite as much: scientists.
For the past couple of years, Elizabeth Bruch and Amie Gordon, University of Michigan researchers, have been working on Revel, a dating app being beta tested by 200 students. The problem with online dating, if you ask Bruch and Gordon, is that the major apps aren’t in the business of relationship science. Some of them do have behavioral scientists and other researchers on staff, but they’re likely to be somewhat limited in their ability to figure out what makes people click. For-profit companies aren’t always well suited to carrying out long-term scientific investigations, which can stretch on for many years and might not yield immediately useful (read: profitable) results. In a commercial setting, Bruch told me, a CEO can decide on a dime to prioritize some new direction, and a whole research project can be abandoned.
Besides, even researchers who study romantic chemistry for a living don’t yet understand it. In one 2017 study, psychologists tried to predict people’s compatibility using a mathematical model based on more than 100 measures of traits and preferences that their subjects self-reported; every combination of those characteristics failed to correlate with how much the participants hit it off when they met.
That’s why Bruch and Gordon started wondering if, however strange it might sound, they could be the right people to make a dating app. Bruch is a sociologist who has studied how people look for mates, as well as the idea of dating “leagues” (as in, she’s out of my league); Gordon is a psychologist interested in what makes some relationships work and others fail. Their app doubles as a scientific study—“For science,” Revel’s website reads, “not profit”—and they collect data in the name of research: seeing who matches, asking why a user did or didn’t “like” someone, following up continuously with pairs who’ve met in person. How many profiles, they want to know, can a person see in a day before feeling overwhelmed by “choice overload”? Does seeing more information about other people lead to better connections? How can the app help support different relationship goals, whether a long-term partnership, a short fling, or a meaningful platonic connection?
Read the full article on The Atlantic.
