More options, worse choices: what choice overload does to dating

The search tools on dating sites are sold as a way to find a better fit from a larger pool. When researchers actually handed people more profiles, they searched more and chose worse.

That says nothing bad about anyone's taste. The person who keeps opening one more profile is doing what a large list invites.

What happened when the list got longer

In 2009, Pai-Lu Wu and Wen-Bin Chiou published More options lead to more searching and worse choices in finding partners for romantic relationships online in CyberPsychology & Behavior (volume 12, pages 315 to 318). PubMed: 19250015.

128 Taiwanese late adolescents and adults with experience in online romantic relationships took part. Each person first entered the traits they wanted in a partner. Then they were randomly assigned to one of three sizes of recommended list. A later paper from the same lab describes those sizes as the top 30, 60, or 90 rankings from a dating-site search.

The researchers watched four things: how many profiles people opened, how far the profiles they viewed sat from their own stated preferences, how far the person they finally picked sat from those preferences, and how selectively they spent their time (more time on better matches, less on worse ones).

The data went the way they predicted. A longer list produced more searching. It also produced a worse final pick, measured as a larger gap between the chosen profile and the traits the person had just said they wanted, and poorer selectivity. Wu and Chiou's reading is that a large set spends the attention you need to ignore irrelevant details and to screen out a weak option.

A longer list produced more searching and a worse final pick, measured against the preferences people had just written down.

None of those people went on a date in this study. "Worse" here means a larger mismatch on a checklist, not a worse relationship. Still, the tool that was supposed to save effort produced extra search, and the extra search did not buy a closer fit.

The people who try to pick the best pay more for the extra names

A year later, Mu-Li Yang and Chiou published Looking online for the best romantic partner reduces decision quality in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking (volume 13, pages 207 to 210). PubMed: 20528280. A PDF of the paper is posted by The Matchmaking Society.

They asked whether the "more-means-worse" pattern is stronger for people who try to maximize, in Herbert Simon's sense: search until you find the best, rather than stop at good enough. 112 teenagers and late adolescents in southern Taiwan, aged 15 to 23, completed a maximizing scale and were then assigned to a shorter list (the top 40 rankings) or a longer one (the top 80).

Maximizers opened a larger share of the list than satisficers did, in both conditions. The longer list still produced worse final picks and weaker selectivity overall. That damage was larger for maximizers. On the preference-difference score (0 to 16 mismatches with the person's own stated traits), maximizers moved from a mean of 5.64 on the short list to 10.71 on the long one. Satisficers moved from 4.75 to 6.64.

The sample is young and "quality" is still checklist fit, so read those as lab scores. The point is narrower: the people most determined to find the best were the ones the long list hurt most. If that is you, the problem is the load, not that you want too much.

Variety confuses the room, even when the count is held still

Number of names is one kind of load. How differently those names differ from each other is another.

In 2011, Alison Lenton and Marco Francesconi published Too much of a good thing? Variety is confusing in mate choice in Biology Letters (volume 7, pages 528 to 531). PMC: PMC3130243. PubMed: 21367779.

They analyzed yes-or-no decisions from 84 commercial speed-dating events: 1,868 women and 1,870 men, each sitting through a series of three-minute mini-dates. Variety was not headcount. For each side of each event they measured how much the available dates varied in age, height, education, occupation, smoking, religion, and body mass, then averaged those standardized variances into one score. Variety and number of options were only weakly related (r = 0.25), so the two can be told apart.

As variety rose, the number of yeses fell. People were also less likely to choose the person the rest of the room preferred, and more likely to choose nobody. Both of those patterns are what you would expect if the extra spread made the decision harder, rather than if it simply made people pickier. The drop in yeses was stronger when more opposite-sex daters were present, which is the combination a large, mixed feed produces every night.

Nobody was assigned to a more or less varied night, and picking the person the room preferred is not the same as finding the right person for you. Treat it as a real-world pattern that matches the lab results, not as proof.

A year earlier, the same authors used those same 84 events in How humans cognitively manage an abundance of mate options in Psychological Science (volume 21, pages 528 to 533). When choosers faced abundant options, they paid more attention to traits that are quick to see, such as height and weight, and less attention to traits that take longer to evaluate, such as education and occupation. A large set does not only slow you down. It changes what you are even using to decide.

This is not the inventory feeling

We have already written about a different cost of the same volume: the feeling of being treated like inventory. That post is about what an endless feed does to how you are seen, and how you start to see other people as stock. This one is about what the feed does to the person choosing.

You can feel respected in a room and still choose badly because the room is too large, or too mixed, to compare.

None of these studies followed anyone into a relationship, and checklist fit is a thin stand-in for whether you will like someone. The effects are tendencies: a longer list did not ruin every choice. On average, though, the set worked against the chooser more than the marketing of "more choice" admits.

A smaller field is a decision tool

The usual advice is to swipe more mindfully. That asks you to out-discipline a list that was built to be long.

The better move is closer to what the studies actually varied. Stop when you have a short set you can compare. A "good enough" stop-rule is not a lowering of standards. In the 2010 study, people less inclined to hold out for the best were less affected by the long list.

Variety is the part people miss. A set of 24 people who are broadly similar is already a lot to hold in mind. A set of 24 who differ on every axis at once is a harder task, and Lenton's events linked more variety with fewer yeses and more people choosing nobody.

Wanting a larger pool feels like diligence. In these studies it behaved like load. Along the Wasatch Front you will not get a coastal-sized feed, and Bloom is built to show you fewer people, on purpose.