Big Dating

Abstract

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Effects of Relationship Goal on Linguistic Behavior in Online Dating Profiles: A Multi-Method Approach

“…Fairly stable characteristics of profile owners affect linguistic behavior consciously and unconsciously at the same time: whereas men and younger adults are more likely to consciously and strategically write words related to income or status, women use more words related to sexuality and physical appearance. On the other hand, in their dating profiles, men and older adults tend to use more first-person plural pronouns (e.g., "we") without being aware, and women and younger adults write more firstperson singular pronouns (e.g., "I") (Groom and Pennebaker, 2005;Davis and Fingerman, 2016;Van Berlo and Ranzini, 2018).…”

“…Prior online dating studies using machine learning methods primarily aimed at building recommendation systems, also those that focused on (natural) language in online dating (e.g., Diaz et al, 2010;Akehurst et al, 2011;Tay et al, 2018). One exception is the study of Van Berlo and Ranzini (2018) who used a datadriven word-based classifier approach to investigate how male and female users of Tinder differ from each other in their textual self-presentations, by focusing on their usage of pronouns, nouns, adjectives, and verbs. For instance, they found nouns like "music, " "film, " "friend, " and "student" to occur relatively frequently: men were more likely to mention "film" and women used "student" more often, while neither men nor women were distinctive in their use of "music" and "friend."…”

“…For those people looking for a longterm relationship, trust is considered an important factor when determining dating desirability and likelihood of contacting (Wotipka and High, 2016). Mentioning these words gives an indication of what a profile owner finds important, either as an own personality trait or as a trait sought for in a potential partner (Van Berlo and Ranzini, 2018). Some of these distinctive contentspecific features of long-term texts provided by the word-based classifier matched with the words considered distinctive for longterm relationship seekers within the Positive Emotion LIWC category.…”

“…Most studies on the textual component in dating profiles focused on deceptive behavior and the profiles' accuracy (e.g., Toma and Hancock, 2012;Lo et al, 2013). Moreover, some studies have investigated the extent to which personality (Weidman et al, 2015) and other stable characteristics such as gender (Groom and Pennebaker, 2005; Van Berlo and Ranzini, 2018) and age (Davis and Fingerman, 2016) are expressed in textual self-descriptions. This usually ties in with other existing research in a variety of writing domains including collected work of writers (e.g., essays, novels and poems; (Pennebaker and King, 1999); Pennebaker and Stone, 2003) and social media language use (e.g., Twitter, blogs and Facebook; Yarkoni, 2010;Nguyen et al, 2013;Schwartz et al, 2013).…”