Our research team at UC Berkeley wrote a paper this year about stated preferences for a mate and actual communication behavior in an online dating system. It’s called “Who’s right and who writes: People, profiles, contacts, and replies in online dating,” and I’ll be presenting it HICSS 43 in January. Here’s the abstract:
In this analysis of profiles and messaging behavior on a major online dating service, we find that, consistent with predictions of evolutionary psychology, women as compared to men state more restrictive preferences for their ideal date. Furthermore, women contact and reply to others more selectively than men. Additionally, we identify connections among messaging behavior, textual self-descriptions in dating profiles, and relationship-relevant traits such as neuroticism.
And here’s a figure from the paper showing what ages people say they’re seeking as well as the ages of the people they actually contact and reply to:
