Scientists Figure out How to Get Way More Matches With Your Dating Profile

People with more original dating profiles are perceived as more attractive and intelligent, new research has found.

According to a study published in the journal PLOS ONE, people who avoid clichés and overused tropes in the text of their profiles are more likely to get matches, with people perceiving them as more attractive as a result.

The researchers asked 1,234 dating site users to rate both the attractiveness of the user, and separately, the originality of their profile. The results showed that people with profiles considered to be more original tended to also score significantly higher on perceived intelligence, sense of humor, and attractiveness.

Dating apps and sites allow users to create a profile advertising themselves as a potential match, including pictures and personal information. Users can be as creative as they choose with their profile. According to the dating site eHarmony, 40 million Americans currently have profiles on online dating websites.

"We measure a profile's success by asking study participants to evaluate the attractiveness of the profile owner on a scale from 1 to 7, as well as asking participants' intentions to date the profile owner on a binary scale (yes/no)," Tess van der Zanden, an assistant professor at Tilburg University and co-author of the paper, told Newsweek.

"This indicates that to determine success we primarily focus on the profile owner, and not necessarily on the profile, but we generally assume that impressions of the profile owner spill over into impressions of the profile, and [vice versa]. Our study on originality, for example, shows that owners of profiles that score higher on perceived originality also score higher on perceived attractiveness."

In a second analysis, the researchers looked at the profiles that were considered more original and found that they used more original stylistic features like metaphors, and also shared more and more concrete personal information.

"Our results reveal that primarily stylistic and self-disclosure features were correlated positively with perceived text originality scores. With regard to stylistic features, our findings show that profiles that score higher on perceived profile text originality are more likely to contain one or more fixed or novel metaphors (e.g., "I'm colorful as the rainbow")," van der Zanden said.

"Considering self-disclosure, we found that both features that looked at the quantity (i.e., the total number of words and the total amount of shared personal information), as well as quality of the self-disclosure (i.e., the occurrence of concrete personal information shared), predicted text originality scores."

However, one drawback of this research is the demographic of the sample group.

"1,234 Members of the Dutch dating platforms 50PlusMatch and Pepper participated in this study on the effects of profile originality on impression formation, with actually the vast majority of them (93.4 percent) being a member of 50PlusMatch, which presents itself as a dating site for active people of 50 years or older," van der Zanden said. "Given this sample, we can thus not generalize our findings and draw any conclusions about general effects of perceived profile text originality on impression formation across all ages, as the participant's mean age was 63.5 years."

According to van der Zanden, on 50PlusMatch, the text component of the profile also plays a more prominent role compared to more picture-prominent platforms, such as Tinder.

"Further research should be done to investigate how different dating demographics appreciate originality in dating profile texts, for example by conducting a comparable study among younger samples as younger adults are often more inclined to use dating applications with more picture-based dating profiles," van der Zanden said.

Additionally, there seemed to be a general consensus on what profiles were considered more and less original among the participants.

"We are currently conducting additional studies to further examine if and how specific textual elements could impact impression formation, as well as to what extent various participant characteristics (e.g., own text creativity) influence originality appreciation."