An Online Dating Blog by Shimrit Elisar

The problem with compatibility testing

March 10th, 2007

There’s been a lot of talk on the industry sites recently about personality testing and matching on various dating sites and whether or not they work. For people who run dating sites, personality tests provide that little bit extra they can offer their customers to get them to choose you over others. In the US, where the online dating market is now leveling out, there is obviously a need to provide extra services and to create the impression that there is a real need and a real demand for such services. America is a country where marriage is now seen almost as a business transaction. There’s even books out there that tell women to leave a man unless he’s proposed within a set duration of time. It’s all about “sealing the deal”. It’s also a society in which people are taught to expect a lot more for their money and, as a result, take a lot less responsibility for their own welfare. The proliferation of fast, processed food is one example of this, as well as the fact that people have actually won lawsuits for having their coffee served too hot. It doesn’t take marketing rocket science to see how simple it would be in an environment like that to create a market for a service that offers to do some of the “hard work” for you and save you time, so you can get back to your “busy life” (cause none of us want to admit our “busy lives” are so empty, we spend most of our free time trying to pick up people online). Unfortunately, the flipside of creating a need for such a service is that you are training people away from thinking (and, more importantly, feeling) for themselves and making their own decisions about who and what is right for them. This is bad in the same way that bombarding people with cheap fast food is bad. It makes people lazy and stops them from developing the skills they need to function as independent individuals. I was reading the comments on onlinepersonalswatch and, even though all experts admit you can’t predict chemistry between people, I was struck by the way each dating site representative tried to tout their particular test as the best way for judging whether someone is likely to be a suitable long-term partner. A quote from Cousin & Wilson on compatibility testing summed up the arrogance for me: “It will not tell you whether or not you are going to fall in love with another person in a compulsive, ‘chemical’ way, just whether or not it is a good idea if you do”. On the surface, this sounds like a very nice statement, but what it ultimately implies is that there are factors in compatibility and attraction that we cannot sense ourselves and we need someone else’s help, someone far more clever than us, to research the subject and make those decisions for us. I personally find this incredibly insulting. Call me old-fashioned or a hopeless romantic, but I wouldn’t want a bunch of stuffy academics locked away in a lab somewhere making decisions about my love life without ever having met me or spoken to me. Academia is a massive bubble. It exists as a separate entity from the reality of day to day existence, as anyone who’s been to university will tell you. Professional academics are generally people who are into research for the sake of it and their constant search for patterns often moves them further and further away from the real word and into the world of pure theory. The above is a gross generalisation. Do you dislike gross generalisations? So do I. That’s why I don’t like compatibility tests. Every working psychotherapist that’s worth his or her money will tell you that there are no quick fixes. There may be patterns or trends, but each person should be taken as an individual influenced by a very particular set of nature Vs nurture factors. A good therapist relies on intuition and common sense on top of their years of education, theory and case studies. If you view people as anything else apart from individuals, you do them a massive injustice. Unfortunately, viewing and working with people as individuals is a model best suited for therapists and not so much for dating sites. Going back to the matter of theory, there are about as many theories about what makes a good, long-lasting relationship as there are people studying the subject. They change every year like any other fashion. The mind is still the most misunderstood organ in the human body. But that is all besides the point. As an end user, I don’t care about academic arguments. Transparency is a nice idea, but most end users on dating sites wouldn’t care about or understand the very complicated algorithms used in any reasonably crafted compatibility test. My eyes glaze over when I look at that stuff and I consider myself to be reasonably intelligent. If I sign up to an expensive dating site offering compatibility testing (and, let’s face it, most such sites charge extra for the service) I want to know that the list of matches the site produces is going to be significantly better than the list produced by the cheaper site that allows me to search directly. In my experience of trying out various dating sites, this has never been the case. I instantly recognised the people I was offered as incompatible with me, not just because of looks, but by blatantly obvious personality-related factors that are important to me, but obviously were not deemed important by the tests. My professional experience of working on one of the UK’s first compatibility test-based site (dreamsdiscovered.com) has taught me that I am not alone in this. The site didn’t do well until we allowed users to complement the test-based matching with being able to search for matches themselves. The fact is, regardless of the theory that drives academic compatibility tests, tests on dating sites are even more limited because of the reality they exist in and this shows.

Here are a few more problems I have with compatibility tests:

1. Not all tests are reputable. How do you know whether the test touted on a particular site is based on sound psychological principles? Some sites use heavy MarketingSpeak to blind people with science, while actually saying very little. It’s very easy to give generic commentary about someone’s character to gain that person’s trust. Try this test to see what I mean.
2. Compatibility tests, even the most reputable ones, are built to measure particular factors. The particular factors measured will depend on whatever theory drives the test. This, to me, is no different than measuring people’s astrological compatibility — it’s just a bunch of factors. It’s up to you whether or not you believe in them.
3. Scientific research is no guarantee of ultimate accuracy. All the dated theories in psychology were based on research as well. When you get into generalisation by personality “type”, genetics, astrological sign, etc. you are putting very limiting labels on people. In my opinion, that’s only a few steps away from skull-measuring. Just because a 1000 people in some study or other reacted in a certain way to something, doesn’t necessarily mean I’d react the same way.
4. People lie on personality tests. Sometimes on purpose, usually because we all have a view of the person we’d like to be and tend to answer questions as if we were that person already.
5. To stay competitive, sites have to keep delivering matches. What happens if there’s nobody who matches someone’s personality according to the test? It’s better for the test to err on the side of generousity, to keep delivering those matches.
6. It would also be pretty bad for dating sites to present their users as anything apart from dateable. Personality testing is therefore likely to center on the good qualities that make a person and understate those qualitied that may be less good. This could end up with the test “marrying up” the two ideals, rather than the two people.
7. Even if you use compatibility testing as a “predicting tool” (as mentioned by one of the responders on onlinepersonalswatch) there is still plenty of margin for error. Comparing it to doctors predicting the chance of future diseases doesn’t make it any more appealing to me. Go watch Gattaca.

In closing, I think compatibility testing is one of those things that dating sites use to one-up one another, but generally they fail to deliver the goods. It’s worth paying the extra money for the fact that most people on such sites are likely to be after a serious relationship/marriage rather than a passing fling, but beyond that there is no guarantee they will work. Sites that try to cover up for delivering poor results by touting their version of magic fairy dust to make you doubt your own ability to choose a long-term mate are really not worth anyone’s time. Why would we be given the ability to intuitively select a short-term mate but not a long-term mate? Surely what we, as humans, need to learn to do is to develop our instincts and intuition further so that we can make our own choices. Not to rely on pure logic (especially someone else’s) to do the job meant for our hearts.

Entry Filed under: Industry stuff, Online Dating Rants