The popular website has released information about three experiments it conducted on its usersσελίδα/ social dating network OkCupid, shortly after the turmoil caused by a similar Facebook announcement to conduct a large-scale psychological experiment unknowingly by its users, modifying the content of 700.000 newsfeeds.
The announcement is signed by Christian Ruder, one of the founders of OkCupid, and is humorously titled "We Experiment on Human Beings!" ('we do experiments on people! »).
“I'll be the first to admit it: we might be popular, we might have a lot of great relationships...but OkCupid doesn't really know what it's doing. Neither does any other site. Besides, it's not that long ago that people started making them, or that you could go see some designs or something. Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better. You find this out by experimenting…we recently realized that people didn't like Facebook 'experimenting' with the news feed…but guess what: if you use the Internet, you're being subjected to hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. This is how sites work."
One of the experiments had to do with the disappearance of profile pictures, another with the power of the photo in relation to the profile text to see if it affected personality ratings, and the other made recommendations to users about whether or not they were a good fit. with other people, who were away from the cmpriceactions that the company's software had actually performed. In particular, as shown, if a user is suggested to have a high "compatibility score" with another user (when in fact it was low), then the former is more likely to try to approach the latter. Those who believed they were reaching out to a "good match" were twice as likely to send at least four messages as people who were told their compatibility score was low. “When we tell people they fit, they act like they do. Even when they don't match" it is noted.
Regarding the photos, the announcement refers to the hiding of photos during "Love is Blind Day", on January 15, 2013. Although there was a general drop in the number of conversations during that time, it was found that compared to a typical Tuesday, within seven hours without photos users responded to first messages 44% more often, conversations were "deeper", contact information (phone numbers, emails), were exchanged faster and "in short, OkCupid was working better». However, as pointed out, the "magic" was lost when the photos came back up, as 2.200 people who were in conversations that had been started "blindly" stopped them. "It was like turning on the bright lights in a bar at midnight," it notes. "Basically, people are only as shallow as technology allows them to be."
The third experiment had to do with the value of a photo in evaluating a profile (at first OkCupid provided two rating scales, one for personality and one for appearance).
As stated in the announcement, on the basis of the small discrepancy between ratings, "appearance" and "personality" were more or less the same, as ratings ranged at similar levels. "After we got rid of the two scales and put only one, we did an experiment to confirm our feeling-that users simply look at the photo ... your picture is really worth a thousand words, but your words are not worth it ... almost nothing "is noted in this regard.
Source: naftemporiki.gr
