Social networks such as Facebook are excellent places to announce your romantic availability, right? Large numbers of potential viewers, integration into profiles, search, and more– what’s not to like? It may not be so easy. Surprisingly, research by psychologists at Northwestern University and MIT suggests that being too available, let alone desperate for romance, can significantly impact your chances of finding love or dating. In a paper entitled “Selective Versus Unselective Romantic Desire,” Paul Eastwick, Eli Finkel, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely use observations on speed-dating to uncover some interesting practical information.
The research
The experimenters conducted 7 speed dating sessions for 156 undergraduate students, each of whom went on 4 minute short “dates” with 9 to 13 individuals. When they returned home, they rated their experiences with each date from 1-9 on three questionnaires covering the following topics:
- romantic desire (”I really liked my interaction partner.”)
- chemistry (”My interaction partner and I had a real connection.”)
- perceived unselectivity (”To what percentage of the other people here today will this person say ‘yes?’”)
Participants also indicated whether or not they’d be interested in future meet-ups with each individual, marking each date as a ‘yes’ or ‘no.’
The results
Interestingly enough, the researchers observed several marked statistically significant findings. They write,
If a participant uniquely desired a particular partner, the partner tended to reciprocate that unique desire. In addition, a participant’s unique romantic desire for a partner positively predicted the partner’s experience of unique chemistry with the participant … In stark contrast to these dyadic effects and to findings from nonromantic contexts, generalized reciprocity was negative … If a participant generally tended to romantically desire others, those others tended not to desire him or her. Furthermore, a participant’s tendency to desire everyone negatively predicted partners’ reports of chemistry with that participant.
In other words, their four main findings are:
- individuals that liked their interaction partners were liked back
- individuals perceived a ‘unique chemistry’ if their interaction partners liked them
- individuals that liked everyone were less liked
- individuals perceived less ‘unique chemistry’ with partners that liked everyone
The implications
Choosing not to mark that “looking for a relationship” box might help you in the long run!
These results suggest that there are two types of romantic desire: generalized, and specific. Generalized romantic desire was a turn-off within the speed-dating experience; when individuals picked up on the notion that their dates weren’t especially picky, they rated them much less desirably than individuals they felt were more specific in their affections.
How does this apply to Facebook? Simple. By marking yourself as “looking for a relationship,” you’re announcing that you might fall into the ‘generalized romantic desire’ category; that is, you might be perceived to be more interested in finding a relationship or dating than the actual individual you might have a chance at getting together with. Ironic how announcing your availability can hurt your chances!
Of course, these results can be applied to much more than just a status checkbox within Facebook: interactions within other social networks, classified advertisements, dating sites, and even in person can all take a little bit of advice from this article with a simple bottom line: don’t be desperate.
Eastwick, P.W., Finkel, E.J., Mochon, D., Ariely, D. (2007). Selective Versus Unselective Romantic Desire: Not All Reciprocity Is Created Equal. Psychological Science, 18(4), 317-319. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01897.x
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
DESOTO WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS SO RIGHT! Great post lovin it. Great points.
I keep myself single on Facebook regardless of what I’m doing. Unless something gets remotely serious, I’ll probably never change it
You’re too kind, man! Glad you enjoyed! I’m gonna try to write more articles similar to this, I really like how I was able to tie social networking and psychology together into one article on peer-reviewed research. Thanks for reading–
Hmm, how serious is remotely serious? Anything long-term (i.e., 1 month plus)?
Yeah, I’d call something that lasts a month serious
nice article (Stumbled it)
Hey Andy, I stumbled across this post via researchblogging.org.
You know, intuitively this makes sense and regardless of my criticisms I agree, but still, the critical part of me has to ask if these results really do generalise beyond the speed-dating-type scenario? I think that’s not a conclusion we can make because the study doesn’t provide evidence that people form impressions of others in a speed-dating situation in the same way they do in other dating situations, let alone online.
Further, the study controlled for physical attractiveness but it doesn’t mention personality attributes beyond the tendency for generalised romantic desire. So it’s possible that some other personality attribute was responsible for the results and generalised romantic desire happened to correlate (though if that’s the case it would probably just mean that that other personality attribute mediated the generalised romantic desire).
However, it could be that another personality attribute was much more important than the perceived generalised romantic desire. If that is the case maybe such a desire isn’t a problem, it could just be a small part of something much greater.
And that matches my personal experience. I don’t hide my pickiness (my Facebook status has never said “Looking for a relationship”), and I have had strong chemistry with some, yet I’m not exactly fending off the girls.
Glad you enjoyed! Come back again soon, eh, and thanks for the stumble!
Hi Mark, it’s good to see someone in from Research Blogging; such a great community and collection of content being built over there.
I definitely share your concern on whether or not we’re able to generalize these results. Since I wasn’t sure what to say myself, I turned to the latest issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science to a followup paper by Finkel and Eastwick called “Speed-Dating” (this article is actually the one that prompted the idea for this post).
The scientists actually claim speed-dating has some measure of external validity, citing “an… advantage of speed-dating procedures is that they exhibit stronger extrenal validity than do many other highly controlled procedures for studying romantic attraction” (p. 195). There’s a great header called “Potential Limitations of Speed-Dating” that’s definitely worth a read; the authors continue to suggest that external validity concerns are hardly specific to the speed-dating methodology in particular. I’m inclined to agree, but solely because speed-dating is more ecologically valid than laboratory methodology doesn’t mean it’s up to appropriate standards to generalize from.
I think you’re absolutely right with your other points. What I wonder is whether or not actual generalized romantic desire (GRD) mirrored the perceived GRD, as this’d make a big difference. If I’m not interested in everyone but everyone thinks I am, for some reason (that personality attribute you mention?), how does that play out?
Hehe, I used to be “looking” a long while back. Then I realized that was a pretty lame admission. I’ll take hurt chances if I can keep my pride, eh!?
Thanks for your wonderful comment, it really gets me thinking. Drop by again soon.
Hey, I just noticed your studies are the same as mine! Well, except for the time scale, maybe. I have a Bachelor of Computer Science degree (as of 7 years ago) and I’m currently halfway through a Graduate Diploma in Psychology. Consider your RSS feed subscribed to.
It’s good to hear others have given that issue due consideration, and not unexpected. I was just a little disappointed that such an obvious thing wasn’t mentioned in this study. Maybe I’m just sensitive after the lack of decent training we’ve been getting in class about how to write a top-notch paper.
I’ll add Finkel and Eastwick’s paper to my pile. Social and Personality Psychology next semester so it might come in handy.
Nice post. I’ve never been a fan of the whole “announce you relationship status” on Facebook, it seems a little useless.
Yeah, exactly. Unless your network of friends uses Facebook as a dating site, it’s probably doing a lot more harm than good.
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