Ethan Zuckerman of GeekCorps fame, has a overview of Helen Fisher’s talk at TED. Helen created the personality test for Chemistry.com, Match.com answer to eHarmony.
TED videos are what you watch to obliterate that box you’ve been thinking inside of for so long. Hundreds of video presentations of people who abandoned the box long ago, and are changing the world because of it. Attending TED costs 6 grand, and it’s nice of them to post the presentations online for free.
At eHarmony Labs, they ask people lots of questions and watch their body language.
Helen sticks people, both in love or recently heartbroken, into an MRI machine to find out how love, and the loss of it affects the brain.
She’s studied people who are happily in love, people who’ve been dumped recently and people who are still in love, twenty years into marriage – she puts them into functional MRI machines and studies their brain structure, trying to understand what parts of the brain are triggered by love.
Chemistry and eHarmony are going after the same grail, love prediction, they just go about it differently.
Most of eHarmony Labs is like science lite. Articles about volunteering at soup kitchens, diabetes and the US economy had me scratching my head. Their blog is updated frequently and has some interesting articles.
I would love to see Helen and some of the eHarmony Labs people in a thoughtful discussion about their research and how it translates into improved matchmaking systems.
Never happen though, too many lawyers to answers to and reputations to uphold.
Online dating is all about marketing, regardless of the amazing work being done at sites like eHarmony and Chemistry. It’s a shame that consumers have to pay the price (literally and figuratively).
