The Love Competition from Brent Hoff on Vimeo.
This has nothing to do with the business of online dating. In fact, this is the farthest thing I’ve ever seen from what we perceive as the human experience of online dating. This is about love.
Online dating isn’t about love. If anything, its about hope. Online dating is looking at profiles, sending messages and by some twist of fate potentially ending up with your life partner, or a partner for just one night.
Psychologists, behavioral scientists, scientists. Everyone has their theories about love, about what constitutes a loving relationship.
Someone sent me a list of hundreds of research papers about relationship compatibility. I’ve read a few studies, and it all just seems so artificial and “in the labs” and not reality. We looked at a bunch of people, and these are the indicators and factors we think lead to long term relationships. And the next paper says something totally the opposite.
The people doing Big Research never seem to write papers, or show up at conferences, or share their research in any meaningful way. Well some do, but nearly enough. Dr Helen Fisher lent her name and expertise to chemistry.com. She, along with other researchers, have been sticking people into Fast MRI machines for years, trying to see what love looks like in our brains. Here’s Helen’s TED talk from 2008, The Brain In Love.
Smart people telling us about what they are learning about relationships is a good start, but how does that translate into the algorithms that will ultimately define our collective fates?
This isn’t about psychological evaluations, personalty tests, hundreds of questions, quizzes, behavioral matching and the rest of it. This is a short film about how some researchers are going right to the heart, er, brain, of the matter of love.
Watch The Love Competition and find out how researchers track activity in the area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.
Contestants have five minutes in an fMRI machine to love someone as hard as they can. Ready, set, go!
“Someone sent me a list of hundreds of research papers about relationship compatibility. I’ve read a few studies, and it all just seems so artificial and “in the labs” and not reality. We looked at a bunch of people, and these are the indicators and factors we think lead to long term relationships. And the next paper says something totally the opposite.”
Was it me Dave?
Because all the new research is clear and says: “Compatibility is all about a high level on personality* similarity* between prospective mates for long term mating with commitment.”
*personality measured with a normative test.
*similarity: there are different ways to calculate similarity, it depends on how mathematically is defined. i.e. STRICT PERSONALITY SIMILARITY and not “meet other people with similar interests”
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 Online Dating Industry needs innovations but they 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 because they are useless at all!)
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.
Personality Based Recommender Systems are the next generation of recommender systems because they perform FAR better than Behavioural ones (past actions and pattern of personal preferences)
That is the only way to improve recommender systems, to include the personality traits of their users.
Have you seen they need to calculate personality similarity between users?
Have you seen there are different formulas to calculate similarity?
In case you did not notice, recommender systems are morphing to ………. compatibility matching engines!!!
They mostly use the Big5 to assess personality and the Pearson correlation coefficient to calculate similarity, and can not break the online dating sound barrier.
WorldWide, there are over 5,000 -five thousand- online dating sites
but no one is using the 16PF5 (or similar) to assess personality of its members!
but no one calculates similarity with a quantized pattern comparison method!
but no one can show Compatibility Distribution Curves to each and every of its members!
but no one is scientifically proven!
What comes after Social Networking?
My bet: The Next Big Investment Opportunity on the Internet will be …. Personalization!
Personality Based Recommender Systems and Strict Personality Based Compatibility Matching Engines for serious Online Dating with the normative 16PF5 personality test. The market remain enormous!!
I liked this post. Find love in yourself is most important before you can love others. Thank you.
Well that was an interesting watch and read. I liked the part where it was about hope. Really makes you think.
It’s kind of like they were reading the tentacles on their DNA. *LOVED* this video. <3
Very interesting video and really makes you think how people perceive love. I’ll be passing this on to others so thank you for sharing this.
I think the notion that online dating brings hope to people is one of the best advancements that modern society has. In the past, if we were single and didn’t have friends to hook us up, or didn’t go out much, we were plain out of luck. Now we pretty much always at least have hope. And that hope is often enough to keep millions of people from giving up their quest to find someone.