When we think about online dating versus traditional methods of dating, we usually focus on how completely different they both are. Asking out the cute girl or handsome guy at work definitely feels different than swiping right on a person’s Tinder profile. What we fail to recognize is the similarities in both interactions. One similarity being how people have always paid attention to the physical attributes when deciding who to date or who to initially interact with. It seems that in both cases it is all about first impressions.
PHYSICAL
by: kiana parkes
In a study done by Hazan and Diamond (2000), it was found that physical attraction and attachment go hand and hand in the initial phases of a romantic relationship. Physical attractiveness is the first thing a person sees and will engage a person to initiate a first date, but attachment keeps the relationship going (Poulsen, Holman, Busby, & Carroll, 2013). In the same study done by Poulsen et al. (2013), experimenters found that young adults who had insecure pictures of themselves had a harder time with getting dates or even getting beyond the initial date. To put these findings into numerical values: every 1 unit increase in physical attractiveness, the average number of second date or more dates with the same person increases by 33%. To be even broader, every 1 unit increase in physical attractiveness accounts for a 72% increase in the odds of moving your relationship into an exclusive one (Poulsen et al., 2013). From this, it seems like people do in fact put an emphasis on physical attractiveness initially whether it is on a screen or in person. The first impression is the engaging factor.
Using someone’s physical attractiveness to determine whether or not you would pursue them may sound accurate to some or even absurd to others, but the question is why do we do this? To put it in a more evolutionary perspective, the end goal in evolution is to produce the most successful offspring. Physically attractive people are people we want to pursue because those people “will provide the best chance of our genes surviving” (Little, Jones, & DeBruine, 2011). Some evolutionary attractive features that experimenters found we look for in a mate is symmetry, averageness, and secondary sexual characteristics (Little et al., 2011). People who are easy on the eyes may exhibit healthy qualities that will produce healthy offspring. Not only that, but your children may have higher chances of being physically attractive, which will increase their ability to attract a physically attractive, healthy mate.
Being physically attractive plays into first impressions. Whether you like it or not, how we look may dictate how we are treated. And that just goes to show that we value first impressions. Online dating websites like Tinder, make use of first impressions just as much as we use first impressions to judge a person. Eric Wargo (n.d.) found that we only take 1/10th of a second to determine if a person is physically attractive. Attractiveness was one of the traits that people were able to access most quickly. This ultimately demonstrates that we judge people based on their looks too much in our lives, that we are trained to access attractiveness in less than a second.
All in all, it doesn’t matter if it is a swipe or seeing that physically attractive person across the room, we base the fate of our dating life initially on how attractive a person is.
References:
Little, A. C., Jones, B. C., & DeBruine, L. M. (2011). Facial attractiveness: evolutionary based research. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 366(1571), 1638-59.
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Wargo, E. (n.d.). How Many Seconds to a First Impression? Retrieved from https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/how-many-seconds-to-a-first-impression
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Poulsen, F. O., Holman, T. B., Busby, D. M., & Carroll, J. S. (2013). Physical attraction, attachment styles, and dating development. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 30(3), 301–319. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407512456673
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Hazan C., Diamond L. M. (2000). The place of attachment in human mating. Review of General Psychology, 4(2), 186–204.