Dating online: the problem of great deal of choice

Better more?

Looking for some new online dating websites, we use to appreciate the attention being paid to our demands and requirements – we can choose from the list of the specialized websites for international dating, gay and lesbian dating, dating for men, women, etc. One would think that a wide array of active users at any of these sites is also one of the undeniable advantages, but things are actually be a bit more complicated.

So, if you think that the more members we have got on the dating website or users of the dating app, the better it is to find someone for flirting, dating or romantic relations, then it might be interesting for you to know about one research. A couple of years ago, one psychologist at Columbia University – her name is Sheena Iyengar – undertook a study on the so-called “tyranny of choice”, which we have to face every day by conducting some experiments, during which people were tempted by various amounts of chocolate and fancy jams.

And at the end of her research Sheena arrived at one counterintuitive conclusion that… more choice can in fact potentially turn out to be even worse than less choice! In fact, the more choice the participants of the experiment faced, the more difficulty they experienced when making up their mind. When there was too much chocolate to choose from, people didn’t enjoy the choice made.

Or better less?

Summarizing the experiment’s results, Iyengar said the same sort of chocolate, selected from a set of 30 different chocolates was considered even less delicious than if it was chosen from a set of six. OK, that’s all interesting, you might say, but how these funny chocolate results can be applied to the present day situation with online dating?

Well, you can visit any website for dating and see it for yourself: dozens, hundreds and thousands of people, all looking for relationships or flirting. A real confectioners shop, don’t you find? Some people might argue that the obsessive wish to try every candy is the very essence of dating, but many people regard it as a kind of must-have shopping. In other words, online dating today turn people into commodities that you can order via the web like a new computer, or a smartphone, appealing to our volatile nature.

So it is no wonder that a lot of single people are getting tired of this tyranny of choice, looking for dating sites that aim at the principle “less is more”. And let’s not forget about the annoying notifications like “You’ve got 200 new matches” – nobody seems to like that.