Tinder as another case for the Bad lemons problem

Depending on what type of a romantic you are, it can get easier or harder to get discouraged by Tinder or similar mate matching apps. The problem that those tools promise to solve is indeed a positive thing to do and by far a third of the US population that is single are using those tools aspiring to find a solution to their mate finding needs with reduced searching costs. (Bapna et al., 2016) However, as the personal experience indicates, the solution of finding a mate seems to work only for a part of the users with particular behavioral traits/needs.

Here I am talking about an observation that in, an honest opinion, apps like Tinder work mostly for people who are literally looking for a mate to mate with, rather than as the article ‘’One-Way Mirrors in Online Dating: A Randomized Field Experiment’’ calls it ‘’a first step towards a date or a marriage’’ (Bapna et al., 2016). The truth is – Tinder will not work for you if you are instead aspiring to find a life-long match or just look for someone with a naïve ‘’clean’’ intentions of really learning more about a potentially interesting person same as yourself. The nature of the app and behavioral psychological underlying processes that rule here, comes to the point – as long as majority (>50%) of the Tinder population use the app for the main purpose of finding who to have sex with the same night, the other portion of users will get trapped in the so called Bad lemons problem. In this case, it means that as far as half of users are coming with less ‘’noble’’ intentions of using the app for satisfying their physical need, the other half will thus converge ‘’downward’’ and also treat the app as only for finding a sex partner and not looking for ‘’a potential person to have something more than just one-night-stand relationship’’. In fact, this is what I have observed to happen in reality. From the experience of messaging interactions with all of the users in becomes clear that nobody believes Tinder to be something more than an ‘’easy to find sex-partner’’ app. Thus, you, as a user on the other side, stop having more complex illusions on the matter of what else, more engaging, the app could have been used for. Thus, you succumb to the working of the Bad lemons theory. Moreover, you start acting on behalf of what the theory anticipates – you behave with the lowest expectations on the outcome, you become another representative of the population of just sex-seeking users who are less engaged to really learn about the person – share a warm dialogue clean of pick-up lines or other flirt suggestive meanings. I mean, you are expected to behave in a certain way when using the app, if you behave differently it will be considered an outlier or otherwise be interpreted as a flirt, again.

Otherwise, as experience indicates, those discouraged or otherwise uninterested in the intended use of Tinder users can start leveraging another hidden or assumingly unintended functionality of the app – learning about your own attractiveness to others. This is indeed a good example of how Tinder can be a tool – useful and easy to gain information, which otherwise is often harder to gain in the real-life environment. Here you use the app as intended but without interacting with the users or your matches (not sending or responding to received messages). In this way, you can gain information on your personal ‘’likability’’ by the users on the other side as well as you can learn about who likes you – what kind of ‘’target customer’’ you are serving (by looking at their profiles and learning about their provided in the profile interests). This metrics, in turn, might teach you on who can be your potential match in the real world. Another mode of this ‘’digital social game’’ is to tweak your profile (photos presented, music and other interests shown) as to later on compare the difference in how your ‘’target customer’’ group on the other side changed on average – what type of person likes you now in comparison to the one before. Cool game is not it?

All in all, examples and explanations presented above show how digitization of some ‘’natural’’ processes such as mate searching in the end are found to be inefficient for a (I assume large, >25%) group of users with needs of more than just finding a one-night-stand. As a byproduct of this inefficiency, the app is becoming used for other purposes than intended – serves as a ‘’find your social attractiveness score’’ tool.

Bibliography

Bapna, R., Ramaprasad, J., Shmueli, G. and Umyarov, A. (2016). One-Way Mirrors in Online Dating: A Randomized Field Experiment. Management Science, 62(11), pp.3100-3122.