Thursday, October 13, 2011

"Generalization in mate choice copying in humans"

The new and fresh paper "Generalization in mate choice copying in humans" is a BIG PUNCH to social online dating sites like:
Badoo, Mamboo and Yangutu where they show "popularity" of profiles
HotORNot where they show photo rankings
and even SpeedDating sites.

Please DO remember also a previous paper "From Dating to Mating and Relating: Predictors of Initial and Long-Term Outcomes of Speed-Dating in a Community Sample"
The chance for mating with a speed-dating partner was 6%, and was increased by men's short-term mating interest; the chance for relating was 4%, and was increased by women's long-term mating interest. Another way of looking at the probabilities of 6% and 4% is to convert them into time and money spent on multiple speeddating events, assuming independence of the outcomes of each event. Assuming that one has to pay 30 Euros for a speed-dating event lasting 3 hours including everything, finding a relationship partner requires investing 75 hours and 750 Euros on average.

Social online dating and SpeedDating are a complete waste of time for serious daters.

Also the paper "Generalization in mate choice copying in humans"  is also a BIG PUNCH to Behavioural Recommender Systems / Recommendation Engines for Online Dating sites like IntroAnalytics, VisualDNA, the one used at PlentyOfFish "UltraMatch" or other system that learns your preferences.
The main disadvantage with (Behavioural) recommendation engines based on collaborative filtering is when users instead of providing their personal preference try to guess the global preference and they introduce bias in the recommendation algorithm.

Behavioural Recommender Systems / Recommendation Engines for Online Dating are ineffective/useless for serious daters.

In previous post I had written about PERSOC.

"Generalization in mate choice copying in humans"
Milan Kundera (1978) describes it as "one of life's great secrets:  women don't look for handsome men, they look for men with beautiful women" (p.12).
"Mate-choice copying in humans has now been reproduced in several laboratories, using as many variants of method. .. (there is) evidence not only for individual-based copying, but trait-based copying as well, showing that this is specific to certain types of traits, and that the use of trait-based copying changes in early adulthood."
"... one's assessment of another's appeal is heightened upon acquiring social information indicating that person as a successful mate. This is individual-based mate-choice copying. Seeing someone succeed in winning some sexual interest of a potential mate makes that person more attractive to observing third parties. But when we acquire such information, have we learned something exclusively about the observed individual, or something more general, applicable also to other potential mates with common characteristics? The present results suggest that this kind of generalization—trait-based mate-choice copying—occurs in humans, but that it is specific to culturally malleable cues, conspicuously not facial traits."




"There is much evidence that humans, as other species, are affected by social information when making mate choice decisions. Witnessing a rival show interest in a member of the opposite sex tends to lead human observers of both sexes to thereafter rate that person as more appealing as a potential mate.
However, how this occurs is not well understood. We investigate whether this effect is specific to the individual witnessed, or will generalize to other potential mates with shared characteristics—that is, whether humans exhibit trait-based or just individual-based mate-choice copying.
We found that whereas this kind of generalization did occur with some traits, it appeared to depend on age, and conspicuously, it did not occur with (inner) facial traits. We discuss possible explanations for the age and cue-specificity in terms of informational benefits and how people attend to unfamiliar faces."
...............
"Experiments
We tested whether human observers' judgments of appeal or attractiveness of stimulus faces would be affected by perceptions of others' apparent sexual interest, mate-choice copying, and further, whether these observers would generalize this change in assessment to other people expressing shared physical traits, trait-based copying. Videos of people on real speed-dates provided naturalistic mate choice  information (see Place 2010 for additional control experiments). We varied two kinds of trait that play a  role in natural mating circumstances: facial characteristics, and culturally acquired characteristics, clothing and hair styles. Comparable experiments were conducted with each class of trait with female participants assessing male stimuli and male participants assessing female stimuli."


Please also read:
Predictability of Personality Traits is Dismal. Never, but never ask daters to describe themselves!!!
Stability and change of personality across the life course:
Personality traits are highly stable in persons over 25 years old to 45 years old (the group of persons who could be most interested in serious online dating) They have only minor changes in personality (less than 1 interval in a normative test) and the 16PF5 test will not "see" them because the output of the 16PF5 test are 16 variables STens (Standard Tens) taking integer values from 1 to 10. STens divide the score scale into ten units. STens have the advantage that they enable results to be thought of in terms of bands of scores, rather than absolute raw scores. These bands are narrow enough to distinguish statistically significant differences between candidates, but wide enough not to over emphasize minor differences between candidates.


ONLY ONE ROAD TO ACHIEVE INNOVATIONS   
Online Dating for serious daters does not need to be more social, it needs to be more effective/efficient. It needs to reduce the false positives problem.
The entire Online Dating Industry for serious daters in 1st World Countries is a HOAX, performing as a Big Online Casino, with low successful rates.
Innovations are not adding more bells and whistles to actual online dating sites.
The Online Dating Industry needs Innovations, but the innovations the Online Dating Industry needs will come from only one source: the latest discoveries in theories of romantic relationships development with commitment. Only 3 major discoveries can help to revolutionize the online dating industry.
I) Several studies showing contraceptive pills users make different mate choices, on average, compared to non-users. "Only short-term but not long-term partner preferences tend to vary with the menstrual cycle"
II) People often report partner preferences that are not compatible with their choices in real life. (FORGET Behavioural recommender systems  or other system that learns your preferences)
III) What is important in attracting people to one another may not be important in making couples happy. Compatibility is all about a high level on personality similarity between prospective mates for long term mating with commitment.


In compatibility matching methods there are 2 steps:
(1) to objectively measure personality traits or other human variables.
WorldWide, there are over 5,000 online dating sites but no one is using the 16PF5 (or similar test like 15FQ+) to assess personality of its members.
Without offering the 16PF5 (or similar test measuring exactly the 16 personality factors, the complete inventory as established by Dr. Raymond Cattell during 1949) for serious dating, it will be impossible to innovate and revolutionize the Online Dating Industry.
(2) to calculate compatibility between prospective mates.

No comments:

Post a Comment