Has OkCupid been messing with YOUR profile? Dating site admits it has been conducting psychological experiments on its members
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OkCupid's co-founder has admitted the firm has been performing mass psychological experiments on users, similar to the ones that landed Facebook in hot water just weeks ago.
Christian Rudder's blog post, 'We Experimented on Human Beings!' backed Facebook's controversial approach - and says its users were subjected to similar experiments without their knowledge or explicit consent.
The company removed text from users' profiles, hid people's photos, and even told some users they were exceptionally good for each other when in fact they were in fact an awful match.
Psychological experiments: OkCupid has been removing users' photos and adjusting 'match percentages' to see how it would change the likelihood of a match
WHAT THEY DID
The company subjected users to a series of experiments - without their knowledge or explicit consent.
It removed text from users' profiles, hid people's photos, and even told some users they were exceptionally good for each other when in fact they were in fact an awful match - only telling the truth after they had exchanged messages.
It also removed all the pictures from OkCupid on January 15, 2013, the company's 10 year anniversary.
The company admittedly performed these experiments just to see what would happen.
'We might be popular, we might create a lot of great relationships, we might blah blah blah,' Rudder wrote.
'But OkCupid doesn't really know what it's doing.
'Neither does any other website.
'Experiments are how you sort all this out.'
He went on to outline several of OkCupid's secret experiments and shared the results of the company's testing.
The site's first experiment, entitled 'Love is blind' consisted of removing all the pictures from OkCupid on January 15, 2013, the company's 10 year anniversary.
The study found that people are generally shallow and tend to overemphasize the importance of a potential partner's good looks.
Conversation stopper: Many users immediately cut off conversation when OkCupid profile photos were reactivated at the end of 'Love is Blind' day
By comparing 'Love Is Blind Day' to a normal Tuesday, OkCupid learned found that in the 7 hours without photos: people responded to messages 44% more often, conversations went deeper and contact details were exchanged more quickly.
When the photos were reinstated, 2,200 people who were in 'blind' conversations ceased communication.
'It was like we'd turned on the bright lights at the bar at midnight.' Rudder observed.
In their second study, OkCupid set out to determine how much a person's profile photos actually matter compared to the information written in their profile.
They noticed that a young female account holder with a 99th percentile personality had a profile that, in fact, contained no text, just a photo of herself in a bikini.
Something fishy: One female account holder's personality was rated in the 99th percentile, yet her profile contained no words, only bikini photos.
The site took a small sample of users and half the time they showed them to potential matches, they hid their profile text.
They discovered that, 'essentially, the text is less than 10% of what people think of you.'
Rudder explained, 'According to our users, 'looks' and 'personality' were the same thing… So, your picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth…almost nothing.'
The site's final experiment focused on the power of suggestion.
FACEBOOK'S FEED EXPERIMENT
The California-based firm carried out the experiment during a week in 2012, and was recently forced to apologise for it after a public outcry.
During that time, negative posts were deprioritized in the data feeds of 689,003 users, to see if it generated a more positive response.
Posts were determined by the experiment to be positive or negative if they contained at least one positive or negative word.
The experiment affected around 0.04 per cent of users - or 1 in 2500.
According to Facebook, nobody's posts were 'hidden,' they just didn't show up on some feeds.
It found that negative posts elicited a swell of positive responses, but also that a reduction in positive news led to more negative posts.
'When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred,' said the researchers.
Throughout the experiment OkCupid proactively deceived people into believing people they were over 90% compatible with people who were in fact terrible matches.
Unsurprisingly, the users sent more first messages when OkCupid said they were compatible, but they also sent more follow up messages.
'When we tell people they are a good match, they act as if they are. Even when they should be wrong for each other,' wrote Rudder.
To most OkCupid users, good looks = great personality. As Rudder wrote, 'your picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth¿almost nothing.¿
After seeing these results, OkCupid also decided to tell people who were actually good for each other, that they were bad, and just to see what would happen. Hearteningly, these pairs quickly realized they were incompatible.
Rudder does note that once the experiment was concluded, the users were notified of the correct match percentage, however he does not clarify whether or not they were told they were part of an experiment.
'Guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site,' he wrote.
'That's how websites work.'
Put the internet to work for you.
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