Intimate Questions
The Causal Effects of Online Dating Apps: Evidence From U.S. Colleges
Berkeren Buyukeren, Alexey Makarin & Heyu Xiong
MIT Working Paper, August 2023
Abstract:
Online dating apps have revolutionized the dating market over the past decade, yet their broader effects remain unclear. We analyze the impact of the early diffusion of the leading dating app -- Tinder -- across U.S. colleges on dating behavior, relationships, and health. For identification, we rely on the ample evidence that Tinder's early promotion strategy focused primarily on Greek organizations on college campuses. Using a comprehensive survey of college students containing more than 1.1 million responses around the year of Tinder's rollout, we estimate a difference-in-differences model comparing student outcomes before and after Tinder's rollout and across individuals with varying Greek organization membership. We find that the introduction of Tinder led to a sharp and persistent increase in reported dating and sexual activity. It had no impact on the probability of being in a relationship or having relationship problems and, on average, caused a relative improvement in student mental health. However, it also increased the frequency of reported instances of sexual assault and sexually transmitted diseases. Accordingly, these effects have downstream impacts on self-reported academic performances. A complementary identification strategy relying on across-college comparisons confirms that the above estimates are not driven by spillovers on non-Greek students. Overall, these findings suggest that, by dramatically reducing search costs, online dating apps altered dating-market equilibria toward higher turnover in romantic couplings and greater prevalence of casual sex.
Stable and Shifting Sexualities among American High School Students, 2015 to 2021
Joel Mittleman
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, September 2023
Abstract:
In a context of widespread attacks on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) youth, statistics on rising LGBTQ+ identification need to be addressed with precision and care. In this visualization, the author presents nationally representative sexuality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Using stacked horizontal bar graphs, the author summarizes American high school students' reported sexual identities and same-sex sexual contacts from 2015 to 2021. In contrast to sensationalistic reporting claiming that these data show "explosive" and "skyrocketing" growth, this visualization illustrates that most measures of American adolescent sexuality have been fairly stable. Since 2015, the only substantial changes that have occurred are in female students' reports of being bisexual or "not sure." These changes in sexual identity have been accompanied only by very modest changes in female students' same-sex sexual contacts. Among male students, sexual identities and contacts have been almost entirely stable since 2015.
Mating fast and slow? Sociosexual orientations are not reflective of life history trajectories
Tran Dinh & Steven Gangestad
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Within evolutionary psychology, a dominant assumption is that adaptive variation in fast versus slow life history strategies centrally includes variation in sociosexual orientations. Fast reproductive strategies -- prioritizing current reproduction and high number of low-quality offspring -- are purportedly facilitated by short-term, uncommitted sexual relationships with multiple partners and investing little in resulting offspring (a high mating effort, low parental effort strategy). Slow strategies -- of producing few, high-quality offspring -- purportedly entails having few lifetime sexual partners and forming long-term, committed pair-bonds in which both parents invest heavily in offspring (a high parental effort, low mating effort strategy). Notably, proposals for individual variation in human life history strategies are inspired by cross-species evidence on covariation of traits related to reproduction and longevity. However, examination of evidence across mammals, birds, and primates reveals that variations in mating versus parental effort are not central to the interspecies dimensions of fast-slow strategies. Variations in pair-bonding and biparental care likewise do not map onto the fast-slow continuum or offspring quantity versus quality dimension. Indeed, in human foraging groups, male provisioning appears to increase offspring quantity. For several reasons, sex with multiple partners does not promote women's fertility rate. Alternative selection pressures are more likely to have led to adaptive variation in human mating strategies.
Beer Goggles or Liquid Courage? Alcohol, Attractiveness Perceptions, and Partner Selection Among Men
Molly Bowdring & Michael Sayette
Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, July 2023, Pages 598-604
Method: Dyads of platonic, same-sex male friends (n = 36; ages 21-27; predominantly White, n = 20) attended two laboratory sessions wherein they consumed alcohol and a no-alcohol control beverage (counterbalanced). Following beverage onset, participants rated PPA [perception of physical attractiveness] of targets using a Likert scale. They also selected four individuals from the PPA rating set to potentially interact with in a future study.
Results: Alcohol did not affect traditional PPA ratings but did significantly enhance the likelihood that participants would choose to interact with the most attractive targets, χ2(1, N = 36) = 10.70, p < .01.
To date a "victim": Testing the stigma of the victim label through an experimental audit of dating apps
Douglas Evans, Chunrye Kim & Nicole Sachs
Journal of Experimental Criminology, September 2023, Pages 615-633
Methods: To measure victim stigma, an experimental audit design used six study profiles, each with pictures of a Black, Latinx, or White cisgender female or cis-male and bio text that in the experimental condition included a brief statement of prior victimization, to compare match rates of profiles disclosing prior victimization with identical profiles not disclosing victimization.
Results: Disclosing victimization reduced total matches for all profiles regardless of sex or race. Racial congruence analyses of matches indicated that relative to the White control profile, all other study profiles were more likely to match with dating app users of a different race/ethnicity, except for the White male victim profile.
Prestige, conformity and gender consistency support a broad-context mechanism underpinning mate-choice copying
Melanie Foreman & Thomas Morgan
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Mate choice is a fitness-relevant decision, that can be informed by the mate choices of others. Such mate-choice copying has been documented across multiple species, including humans. However, so has copying in many other contexts. As such, the extent to which mate-choice copying is underpinned by the same psychological mechanisms as copying in other contexts remains unclear. To test these hypotheses, we conducted an online experiment (recruiting from M-Turk, n = 165) to examine whether human mate choice copying is prestige and/or conformist biased (both of which are documented in other domains), and whether it differs between men and women. If mate choice copying is underpinned by broad-context mechanisms, we predict it will be similar in men and women, with both groups also exhibiting prestige-biased and conformist transmission. Our results match these predictions, exhibiting no evidence of a difference in mate-choice copying between men and women, and evidence of prestige-biased and conformist transmission. These results suggest that mate choice copying is the product of adaptive, broad-context copying mechanisms.