Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [57]
All of this is not to say that these dating sites don’t successfully match many people. They undoubtedly do. What I am suggesting is that their success has little to do with their so-called scientific algorithms. If you match enough people, some of them are bound to end up together, regardless of what sorting system you use. As the most honest scientific advisers to these sites admit, this field is in its infancy, and no one has cracked the code yet. The key word, though, is yet. The good news is that these dating Web sites and social networking sites such as Facebook.com and MySpace.com are starting to provide researchers with an enormous amount of information on the how and the why of what draws one person to another, and in a few years science may be able to provide much more refined and nuanced answers to these questions. That said, something as elusive as the nature of attraction between a man and woman remains a daunting scientific challenge. To offer a point of comparison, just think of IQ tests. You would imagine that measuring someone’s intelligence would be a relatively easy task. The tests were developed in the early part of the twentieth century and have had plenty of time to be refined and improved. And it’s not as if lots of money hasn’t been thrown at this problem. Despite all of these efforts, though, IQ tests still do only a crude job at best of measuring intelligence. They do an excellent job of revealing things like your parents’ socioeconomic background, but that is a little like congratulating a dancer for having good handwriting. So, while the formulas that these sites use for finding love will undoubtedly get better over time, I wouldn’t wait around hoping for them to solve your romantic problems.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The real question is, can we use the idea of the market to our advantage when it comes to dating? To put it in economic terms, we want to look for undervalued assets that we can get for a bargain and avoid overpriced qualities for which we will pay a hefty premium. Once you look at the dating market in these terms, you can find good and bad deals all over the place. Take, for example, short men. Women place an enormous value on height. In a study of personal ads, 80 percent of the women said they wanted a man at least six feet tall. Women value it so much that they end up overvaluing it in market terms. In a recent study of online dating, researchers found that a 5’6” man needed to earn about $175,000 a year more than a six-foot man in order to overcome his height disadvantage. A different online study basically replicated these results, finding that a 5’8” man needed to earn $146,000 more than the average salary to attract the same women as a six-foot-tall man, while a five-foot man needed to earn a whopping $325,000 more than the average.
By any measure, women are wildly overpaying for these extra inches of height, asking for roughly $30,000 a year in salary for each inch they are giving up. It’s enough to make you wonder why any man 5’11” and under isn’t wearing lifts. There is no denying that height is what biologists call a fitness indicator, a sign of good genes and good health, and studies have shown that women attribute all sorts of excellent qualities to tall men based on their height. Other studies have shown that tall men do enjoy many societal advantages as well. For example, it’s virtually impossible to become president of this country if you aren’t tall. You have to go all the way back to the nineteenth century to find the last