Dating, Sex, and Herpes, a Q&A at the NYT with Dr. Peter Leone. Starts this way:
Can you have herpes but never even know it? Can the herpes simplex virus spread even if you don’t have symptoms? And how do you navigate the maze of sex and dating when you know you are infected with herpes?
A lively takedown of pay dating sites on the OkCupid Blog–simultaneously demystifying the online dating process.
There is a negative correlation between the number of messages a man sends per day to the reply rate he gets.The more messages you send, the worse response rate you get. It’s not hard to see why this would be so. A rushed, unfocused message is bound to get a worse response than something you spend time on.
Too many choices, at the grocery store or in dating, can lead to hasty decision-making–or so says a study reported at PsychCentral:
In this environment, researchers found that people respond by paying attention to different types of characteristics – discarding attributes such as education, smoking status, and occupation in favor of physical characteristics such as height and weight….[I]f the brain is faced with abundant choice, even about who to go out with, it may make decisions based on what it can evaluate most quickly.
It may not have taken a psych study to figure out that there’s a gender split regarding feelings about hooking up among college students. But of interest: all still prefer dating to hooking up–or at least say they do to a psych researcher.
PsyBlog digs into psych study history and answers the question, Does Playing Hard To Get Work?:
[E]very time psychologists used an experiment to test the idea that playing hard to get is a good dating strategy, their results didn’t make any sense. At least not until 1973 when Elaine Walster and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin finally hit upon a method that teased out the subtleties (Walster et al., 1973).
For internet daters (and stats lovers), a series of new and old posts at the OkCupid.com blog:
Interactive maps showing why men should be looking to date older women, among other things.
Another entry looks at the data and comes up with Exactly What to Say in a First Message.
Another looks at How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating.
Plenty more where these came from on the site…
For online dating site users, here’s a statistical analysis of picture styles (smiling, looking at the camera, clothed, doing something interesting, etc.) versus number of initial contacts. May be vaguely useful, and for others, vaguely entertaining.
To write this piece, we cataloged over 7,000 photographs on OkCupid.com…In looking closely at the astonishingly wide variety of ways our users have chosen to represent themselves, we discovered much of the collective wisdom about profile pictures was wrong.
Continue reading the 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures.
