TMCnet Feature

While many dating sites claim to use science to match up potential suitors, a team of psychologists disputes their claims.

Harry Reis, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester, is publishing an article in the February edition of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

Reis and the other psychologists co-authoring the article dispute the proprietary nature of the dating sites’ methods.

"Companies have notmadetheiralgorithms available to the public, nor even to regulatory authorities. Nobody knows what the algorithms are,” Reis told PC World. “It is certainly possible they have some magic formula no one has looked at that could in fact be effective. However, there is no evidence for that."

The study, which was commissioned by the Association for Psychological science, summarizes over 400 studies already done on online dating.

Online dating has grown considerably since the 1990s. In the first half of the ‘90s, less than one percent of all people had found a partner using commercial dating services, including classified ads.

By 2005, 37 percent of single adults had dated someone they met online. By 2009, 27 percent of heterosexual couples and 61 percent of same-sex couples had said they found each other online.

One of the advantages of online dating is that users can browse endlessly to find a potential mate.

“But it can also encourage a mentality where one goes through a list of partners in the same way one might go through a list of books on Amazon. And often this approach is not helpful," researchers said.

The researchers took issue with the presentation of sites like eHarmony and others that say that their techniques are scientific.

One example may be the use of eye-tracking studies to claim that men tend to look on dating sites while women read descriptions.

The problem, Reis says, is that the companies don’t make their algorithms available to the scientific community, instead guarding them as trade secrets. They publish on their own sites instead of scholarly, peer-reviewed journals.

The idea that people can be right or wrong for each other based on certain traits is also suspect. Reis said it’s impossible for a couple to tell if they’re compatible if they’ve only known each other for a short while. “Relationship success over a long period depends on how two people interact with one another. It depends on what happens in their lives, the adversities and successes they have together, the way in which their lives mature and grow. These things are simply not knowable before they meet," he said.