The Cyber Effect (30 page)

On Tinder, you respond to profile photographs prior to any information. And you adjust your settings to find prospects in a proximal range that makes sense for you. Based on your location, photographs of prospects are provided. If you like a picture you see, you swipe right to learn more.

By 2016, a little more than three years after its launch, Tinder claimed to have generated 9 billion matches—more than the human population on earth—which suggests that either the whole world is using the dating app or some people are just really, really active. The stats are impressive: 196 countries, 1.4 billion swipes per day, 26 million matches per day. On the homepage, a photo collage of super-handsome young people fills the screen, with testimonials about how they owe their relationships and marriages to Tinder.
He told me I was
a girl he would drive two and a half hours to meet….He proposed after a helicopter ride….Without Tinder, there would be no chance of us meeting
.

The process of swiping right for approval—and learning that your own image has been swiped right by someone else—has been described as “addictive” and even rewarding on a neurological level. But the promise of Tinder is that the app will fulfill your wishes for true love, and for adventure. The homepage sells romance as transformative: “The people we meet change our lives. A friend, a date, a romance, or even a chance encounter can change someone's life forever. Tinder empowers users around the world to create new connections that otherwise might never have been possible. We build products that bring people together.”

Tinder CEO Sean Rad and I both spoke at a Web summit in Dublin in 2015. The venue was packed for Rad's talk, with thousands of people just waiting to be entertained by “hooking up” anecdotes, but his delivery was strangely flat, especially given the potential of the material. He gave a standard product pitch rather than regaling the auditorium with breathtaking insights into technology-facilitated mating rituals. And when he did wander into the subject of courtship, his advice was direct but not that profound. “The best piece of advice I give our users is be yourself,” he said. “We underestimate our ability to look at a photo and pick up the nuances. When you're not yourself, people can sniff that.”

Are we moving toward an era when technology-mediated relationships will be ephemeral—lasting only as long as a swipe? If swiping is the act that people find neurologically rewarding, it may be that they enjoy that more than actually finding a mate, or love. Some surveys suggest that face-to-face encounters between individuals—romantic or otherwise—are steadily on the decline. And there is evidence that dating apps and sexting, as well as other virtual encounters, actually may have a negative impact on people's sex lives.

When you fall for a face on Tinder, what are you falling for? As Rad suggests, do people really pick up on nuances, or what a cyberpsychologist would call “behavioral cues embedded in the image”? Psychoanalyst Dr. Robert Akeret has written books on the subject of how
to analyze images and learn to see deeply into a still picture. In
Photolanguage: How Photos Reveal the Fascinating Stories of Our Lives and Relationships
, he interprets “
hidden desires and fears, unspoken loves and hates, people's valiant efforts to camouflage themselves in the public world, and the inevitable leakage of their hopes and dreams and difficulties.”

Leakage, now that's an idea. Never mind the language of love; what about the leakage?

As the success of Tinder proves, besides proximity, physical appearance is the most important driver in choosing a date and mate. In romantic relationships, appearance plays an especially critical role in whether a bond is formed or not. Obviously, this is subjective and personal. Beauty is (truly) in the eye of the beholder. But in study after study it has been shown that people tend to pair off with others of similar attractiveness, which means that an attractive person is also likely to draw a similarly attractive mate.

When stacked up against other traits like intelligence, warmth, or humor in the real face-to-face dating world, beauty almost always beats them out.

This doesn't mean that humans are supershallow and care only about looks. Attractiveness is a powerful asset in the competition for mates partly due to the
halo effect
. If a person is judged as attractive, it bleeds over and positively influences other impressions that are formed about him or her. This is why attractive people are judged as happier, warmer, and kinder, as well as more sociable, likable, successful, and intelligent. Attractiveness is a factor in almost every aspect of life and has been proven to give an individual huge advantages.

Here's how the halo effect works. Say, for instance, that you hear about a man you've never met who has rescued an old woman's cat from a tree. Would a bad guy rescue a granny's helpless animal? Surely not. This information puts everything else about the man in a positive light. This goes for certain professions, like emergency medical workers,
firemen, and other first-responder jobs. It is hard to imagine selfish, insensitive people in these lines of work. Is it rational? No. The rules of probability demand there are all kinds of less-than-wonderful people in positive-halo-effect jobs, but being in these professions can cast a positive glow nonetheless.

Attractiveness works exactly the same way. Are there selfish, dimwitted, unsuccessful attractive people? Of course there are. But irrationally, human beings associate attractiveness as an overall positive sign. This could be because appearance is easy to judge. It is literally the first and most noticeable trait about anybody you meet, unlike the less obvious traits like honesty, integrity, reliability, and loyalty, which take some time to ascertain.

Making a quick judgment that someone is attractive is simple and, in terms of evolution, effective. Attractiveness usually indicates that an individual has fairly good odds of being healthy and fit, inside and out. The sheer convenience alone of this judgment call may be why it's so important.

How does this play out as a cyber effect? It is human nature to want to compete for dates and mates, to groom and try to improve our appearance and make a good impression, particularly when we are in dating mode.
This is evolutionary reality.

As I described in the previous chapter about teens, the norms of cyberspace put even more emphasis on appearance—and how it is presented on social platforms. There is more pressure from the group to invest in appearance and self-presentation. Tinder's secret ranking algorithm—although they call it a “
desirability score”—is a form of feedback loop. While sophisticated and exotic, it is basically ranking your cyber self—that carefully and consciously curated, filtered, Photoshopped, and otherwise enhanced self that many people now use online.

Almost anyone can achieve supermodel levels of beauty in cyberspace, particularly in a photo that captures only one quarter of the face. And in that regard, technology has been the ultimate equalizer in the genetic lottery of good looks. The norm online is now to see people who have been filtered—made thinner, taller, tanner, and blemish-free. This means the techno-evolutionary competition to appear attractive
has grown even more intense. Survival of the fittest now requires expert Photoshopping skills. There is little doubt this will continue.

As the cyber norm becomes more attractive, the halo effect of attractiveness is escalated online as well, partly because of the importance of first impressions and some of the laws that govern them. One of these is the
primacy effect
, which describes how one attractive trait or feature of a person you meet will jump out and grab your attention—and drown out all others. “Oh my goodness, his eyes are so blue!” “Wow, she has lips like Angelina Jolie!” When you consider your own appearance, what is your best feature? That's your primacy effect. If you are going online to date, you should know it.

In cyberpsychology, two constructs are used to describe the power of impressions made online. When you make assumptions about a person based on their Match.​com profile photo, for instance, that is known as
impression formation
. And when you filter and fix and curate your own profile photo on Match.​com, it's
impression management
. The mere act of choosing which picture to use on a dating site—active, smiling, unblemished, or nostalgic—requires that you imagine how you look to others and aim to enhance that impression.

Like it or not, there are arguments for doing just that—if a real-world meeting is not likely. Because if people find your profile photograph attractive, they will form a better impression of you, and that impression can have a strong and lasting effect on the other judgments they will subsequently make about you.

But an online dating site is different. Individuals need to communicate attractiveness but not alter their profile photographs to the point of rendering them unrecognizable in real life. At the same time, a profile photograph on a dating site or app creates an impression—made in roughly forty-two milliseconds—and that impression will cause a bias.

Science being science, and considering how obsessed with appearance people are on dating sites, there has been good research done about
what kind of profile photographs lead to the best first impressions. This is the intersection of science and digital media, and as serious as that sounds, I also find it pretty funny. There is no harm—and actually some good—in passing along the findings based on the best research available.

IMPRESSION-MANAGEMENT TIPS FOR YOUR PROFILE PHOTO

Wait.

What's a squinch?

It is a slight squeezing of the lower lids of the eyes, kind of like Clint Eastwood makes in his Dirty Harry movies, just before he says, “Go ahead. Make my day.” It's less than a squint, not enough to cause your eyes to close or your crow's-feet to take over your face. If you want a tutorial on how to produce the perfect one, then I can recommend one by professional photographer Peter Hurley, available on YouTube, called “It's All About the Squinch.”

It probably goes without saying that online dating has been around long enough for some individuals to have become quite expert at making an inordinately good impression in cyberspace. They have their squinch down, and can even charm you, initially. These are deceptive skills that can work for them in real life too. While some individuals may use cyber-dating to experiment with new selves, new behaviors, or a new gender, there are other people who just like to lie about who they are—and trick strangers. It isn't an “honest mistake” or misunderstanding arising from experimentation. It is simply fraud and trickery.

A famous case of what is known in cyberpsychology as
identity deception
occurred early in the rise of the Internet, on a women's discussion board. One participant in the forum, Joan, described herself as wheelchair-bound and mute—which explained why she could not attend
face-to-face meetings. Online, she expressed herself and her desires to find romance—and earned the trust of other women on the forum, some of whom were also looking for a relationship. Helpfully, Joan introduced these women to an able-bodied friend of hers, a psychotherapist named Alex, who won the trust of the women in the forum and, eventually, had sex with them. Unfortunately, though, it was discovered that Alex was actually Joan too. He had invented the Joan persona online, he claimed, to better understand his patients. But he took the role too far—and just couldn't stop being Joan.

Another kind of trickery online is called
catfishing
, which has been dramatically illustrated by an MTV series in which each episode follows, reality TV–style, two people who are having a relationship solely online—sometimes using a false name, false age, or false gender. The term was coined in 2010 with the release of a compelling documentary,
Catfish
, about Nev Schulman (now the host of the MTV show), who fell in love with a beautiful and vivacious girl in a small Midwestern town whom he “friended” on Facebook. They corresponded for months. When he went on a road trip with a documentary film crew to meet her, he discovered that she wasn't real. Instead, she was the creation of an unhappy and seriously overweight forty-year-old mother of three. She felt just terrible, she claimed. And wasn't out to hurt anybody. But, of course, she did hurt somebody.

Yes, there have always been tricksters, con artists, and liars among us who pretend to be somebody they aren't. But technology has made it so much easier. You can set up new email addresses in minutes, conjure letterheads, business cards, an email string, and contact list, and make hundreds of Facebook friends in a day. You can create a convincing profile and social-network presence harvested from Google image searches or Facebook. (This is all made possible because content is difficult to secure.) Once upon a time, deception required skill and, I hate to say it, even artistry. Now you don't need the imagination of a Tolstoy or Dickens to create a totally believable but fictional identity. It's a matter of cut-and-paste.

Another type of trickster online is more malicious. As discussed in previous chapters,
trolls
are individuals who deceive for the joy of deceiving—stimulating controversy and taking people by surprise. For
those who use dating sites, trolling can be a real problem. Trolls on dating sites are capable of anything from sexual harassment, lewd comments, and name-calling to cyber-exhibitionism and threats. The motivation can be similar to catfishing—often a combination of boredom, attention-seeking, revenge, pleasure, and a desire to cause disruption and damage. It is clearly aggressive and sometimes sociopathic. Women are often the victims.