While
news of Facebook's emotion-manipulation study sparked public outrage
and investigations from regulators, dating site OkCupid is letting its
users know that human experiments are a reality of using the Internet.
In
a post called "We Experiment on Human Beings," founder Christian Rudder
took to OkCupid's blog Monday to defend human experimentation and
remind users that such tests are extremely common and even beneficial to
users.
"Guess
what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of
hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site," founder
Christian Rudder wrote in a post on the OkTrends blog. "That’s how
websites work."
The post went on to detail three such experiments the site conducted with users.
Two
of the experiments revolved around user photos, which play a big role,
of course, in how users on a dating site interact with one another.
For
one test in January 2013, "Love is Blind Day," the site temporarily
removed all users' photos to see how it would affect their interactions.
Unsurprisingly, the site's traffic went down significantly, but those
who did use the site in that time reportedly responded to first messages
more often and exchanged contact information more quickly.
Until photos were restored, that is, at which point conversations that had started "blindly" "melted away."
The
experiment also found, however, that men and women who actually tried
out a "blind" date reported having a good time regardless of how
attractive their date was. Furthermore, women who went on dates with
more attractive men were reportedly less happy than those who went on
dates with less attractive men (Rudder speculates it's because "hotter
guys were assholes more often"). He also noted that, once photos were
restored, the same women allowed looks to dictate whether or not they
responded to messages, concluding that
"people are exactly as shallow as their technology allows them to be."
The
next photo-focused experiment revolved around determining whether there
was a correlation between how users scored each other for looks and
personality. The thinking, Rudder explained, was to see whether users
would positively rate a user's personality, even if they didn't
positively rate their looks.
Again,
the study found that looks trumped other factors and users
positively-rated the personalities of people they found attractive, even
if the rest of their profile was blank. They strengthened this theory
in a followup, in which they compared how users reacted to profiles when
the text of the profiles was hidden.
The
results showed that text contributed less than 10% to how profiles were
rated. "So, your picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your
actual words are worth … almost nothing," Rudder wrote.
The
final experiment examined the power of suggestion in the site's
matchmaking process. The site changed the results of its match algorithm
to tell users who were actually judged to be incompatible that they
were, in fact, highly compatible. The study found users who were told
they were well-matched were much more likely to exchange messages and
interact with one another, even if they were actually incompatible by
the site's own metrics.
While
this may seem counterintuitive for a site that purports to give users
personalized recommendations based on their personality traits, Rudder
says the experiment revealed that while actual compatibility is ideal,
the suggestion of compatibility can be just as effective.
"If you have to choose only one or the other, the mere myth of compatibility works just as well as the truth," he wrote.
Based
on the few comments on the blog, users are thus far neither creeped out
nor upset by OkCupid's brand of human experimentation. They found the
data to be funny and "kinda depressing."
Posted by : Gizmeon
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