Science Says Possessing This One Trait Gets You More Matches On Dating Apps
A new study published in the Social Network Analysis and Mining journal shows that men and women have behavioral differences when they use dating apps. You probably knew that already. But there's one specific trait that separates the men from the women: self-consciousness.
We're often told not to be very self-conscious and just be ourselves, but in an interesting twist, it looks like being more self-conscious is more fruitful on dating apps.
On dating apps, women are much more aware of their level of attractiveness, while men are somewhat oblivious to their attractiveness to women. When deciding whether or not to message someone, women evaluate the chance they'll get a response based on her awareness of the differences in attractiveness between her and her potential date.
Men don't do the same. And because men are less self-conscious about the way they come off, they tend to overshoot. Co-author of the study and doctoral candidate Shuangfei Zhai notes: "We found that males like to send a lot of messages to attractive female users, but they don't get a lot of responses."
Men are rash in the messages they send; in other words, they don't have much regard for women's interests because they're too invested in their own, which is a turn-off for women.
Women also have more luck because they are more self-conscious of their profiles. Concerned with how they will be perceived by their prospective male matches, women put more care in their photos and profiles. Thirty percent of women consult their friends about their dating profiles, whereas only 16 percent of men do.
Hey, all the single men out there, listen up. If you want to score more matches, just put a little more thought into your profile and the messages you send. In the end, having luck on dating apps is a combination of sending the right message to the right person at the right time, so using the same mass message for every girl you talk to probably isn't your best shot at finding your match.
