Instead of writing about how technology has affected dating today (which is a fantastic topic that deserves more in-depth discussion), I wanted to speak more on how dating applications can help. With the rise of photo-centric platforms, target niche audiences, and gamification of the entire experience, these exploding types of curation have left people feeling more lonely and empty than before. The feeling of exhaustion attributes to going through the motions of swiping with no emotional fulfillment. Study done by a Harvard Business School Professor shows that men find browsing countless photos of women entertaining, but not vise versa when the genders are switched.
So, the question is how do we help turn it around and how do we leverage technology in the right way? This blog will focus more on how a dating application that encourages self-disclosure can help users expand their parameters on dating, and have more success and efficiency with finding meaningful relationships online. The other topics of how everyone now has an increase in the dating option pool and how photos are more misleading than helping will be documented on separate blogs since these topics belong to different schools of studies and deserve their respective discussions.
String was inspired by the study conducted by Arthur Aron who developed the "36 questions that lead to love," made popular by the famous article on NY Times. The idea was of course also initially inspired by personal experience. I had recently appeared on the Dating & Tech panel hosted by The Expat Woman speaking about the encounter of this wonderful guy I met at a dive bar. We went on a couple dates but in my head, I kept asking myself - which dating application would have curated this guy for me? Being that dating applications are getting more and more superficial, I'm not sure if we would've been matched. Do I really have to go to "all the bars" to meet guys in order to expand my dating parameters?
After researching more on Arthur Aron's study and enlisting the help of my friend Randy, a Ph. D. in Intimate Relationships, there is overwhelming evidence that technology when leveraged in the right way can jumpstart online encounters into meaningful and long-lived relationships. The key is encouraging users to self-disclose and become vulnerable. String does this by asking the users scientifically curated questions that are designed to generate deep emotional responses to draw the user in. The profile sets the premise for greater insight and generates a level of interest to discover more about the person behind those answers. In an age where users are just looking at photos and Facebook page likes, there's not much information that really pulls at the user's heartstrings or instills a deep motivation to get to know the person beyond photoshopped pictures and random musings.
Numerous psychological studies show the tremendous benefits of meeting online over in person, how anonymity can be used to generate intimacy and using this knowledge, break down that initial barrier to bring two people closer together online.
1. First of all, people are more likely to skip past superficial conversation and engage in deeper questioning and self-disclosure in computer mediated rather than face-to-face discussions. This supports the hypothesis that dating technology can be a more intimate context for meeting people than many real life interactions. Src: Tidwell and Walther (2002)
2. In addition, believe it or not, meeting someone online instead of face-to-face leads to more mutual fondness, both during the initial and subsequent interactions. The study concludes that, in addition to increasing self-disclosure, the internet fosters relationships by allowing people to better express their true selves, especially shy or lonely people. They also argue that another advantage of meeting online is the relative absence of gating features (such as physical appearance, stigmas, social anxiety, etc.), which often derail potential relationships before intimacy and disclosure can even begin. String will only allow the users to expand matches after they've formed a connection via liking each other's self-disclosure responses. Src: McKenna, Green, and Gleason (2002)
3. When asking the right questions, people can feel more intimate and (guess what) passion online; or in the true words spoken by a wise friend: "Intimacy and passion are derivatives of self-disclosure." Src: Baumeister and Bratslavsky (1999)
4. Finally, self-disclosure, which is what String is all about, leads to three major effects: people who disclose are more liked, people disclose more to people they like, and people like others to whom they have disclosed. String leads to liking all the way around! Src: Collins and Miller (1994)
