Can Your Dating Profile Attract More Attention?

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In addition to being used as a method for finding a long-term partner, many dating apps are a way of finding someone for a short-term hookup, with people reporting different partner requirements for each scenario. Broadly, these requirements are related to sex differences, with women likely to report that, overall, men’s resources (wealth and ambition) rather than their physical attractiveness are important for a long-term relationship. However, for short-term relationships, women often focus more on physical attractiveness, and maybe less on men’s resources. Men, overall, tend to look for physical attractiveness in women, regardless of the resources they possess when seeking both long- and short-term relationships.

In most previous studies, the method for investigating men’s and women’s partner preferences as described above has involved self-report, where respondents are simply asked for their stated preferences. However, in their study, researchers Madeleine Gale from the University of Newcastle and Rosemary Torbay and Amy Lykins from the University of New England, Australia, examined how men and women view mate choice information on online dating sites using eye-tracking methodology. Specifically, they examined how physical attractiveness and a potential mate’s resources influenced participants’ choices when seeking long-term and short-term relationships.

These researchers employed 20 men and 20 women who were presented with 24 opposite sex dating profiles, which were divided into two regions of interest. One region showed the profile owner’s face, and the other region displayed resource information. The faces depicted in the dating profiles were either high or low in physical attractiveness, and high or low in resource potential (income and occupation). Eye tracking equipment assessed and recorded eye movements to each region of the profile. Gaze time is an accepted measure of a person’s interest, with longer gaze times being indicative of a greater level of interest. Participants also rated each profile for overall attractiveness, and attractiveness for a short-term relationship and a long-term relationship.

What do we look at

The researchers found that participants looked more at the face of the dating profile compared with the written information, which outlined the resource potential of the profile. Overall, participants spent 83 percent of the time analysing the profile face, indicating that faces give important information when we are considering mate choice. Furthermore, time spent looking at the profile owner’s face increased when the profile owner was described as having low resource potential (income and employment status).

In terms of sex differences, the researchers found that when male profile descriptions indicated that a man’s resource level was low, women spent more time looking at the profile faces of men, regardless of their level of facial attractiveness. However, resource potential did not affect the amount of time men spent viewing women’s faces. Even when women’s profiles described them as being higher in resource potential, this still did not influence the attention men gave to these profile photos. This would seem to indicate that the most salient feature in men’s assessment of women’s dating profiles is the face and not the description of the resources they possess.

Short-term or long-term

In terms of relationship length, men reported that they preferred lower attractiveness and lower resource level women more for a short-term relationship compared with a long-term one. Women, on the other hand, chose lower attractiveness men for a long-term relationship compared with those chosen for a short-term one.

The overall message here is that men prefer attractive women with low levels of resources for short-term relationships, whereas women settle for lower attractiveness and higher resources in men for long-term relationships. The findings confirm the self-report data on how we assess potential partners and are also consistent with evolutionary theory, which posits that men are likely to focus more on physical attractiveness in mate choice, whereas women differ in their preferences according to relationship type. In addition to this, the findings provide some practical implications for how we need to construct our dating profiles.