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OK, Cupid playing fast and loose with love

Dating website offers no apologies for bad matches

This might be the explanation for your last bad date.

Dating website OkCupid purposefully set up bad matches to see how people would behave.

The site was unapologetic about the experiments, despite controversy over Facebook’s study to test if it could manipulate users’ emotions.

“OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing,” wrote OkCupid President Christian Rudder in a blog post Monday.

He said, “If you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.”

In one experiment, the website told pairs they were a 90 percent match when in fact they were a 30 percent match. When people were told they are a good match, they were more likely to send each other messages through the site.

To test if its matching algorithm works and goes beyond the power of suggestion, OkCupid also told good matches they were bad matches. Good matches, even if told they weren’t compatible, still connected but not as much as when they knew their actual compatibility.

In another experiment, OkCupid asked users to rate people’s looks and personalities based on their profiles. In profiles without text, people tended to rate a better personality with better looks.

“So, your picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth … almost nothing,” Rudder said.

For seven hours in January 2013, OkCupid removed all the pictures from the app and found people actually interacted more.

Users responded 44 percent more often to a first message, and contact details were exchanged more quickly compared to when photos were available, according to Rudder’s post.

But when the photos returned, the conversations of the 2,200 people who were on “blind dates” disappeared.

“The goodness was gone, in fact, worse than gone,” Rudder wrote. “It was like we’d turned on the bright lights at the bar at midnight.”

© 2014 USA TODAY. All rights reserved.



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