It's Not Really My Field, But.... - Professor Dan Ariely

great so I figured I'll be the lighter note on the previous two speakers how many people here have ever tried online dating okay and not too many I recommend it highly for two reasons one it's a really interesting insight into human psychology and the second thing is that you become much more optimistic because there's so many wonderful people online it's just amazing and so we've got all kinds of projects on online dating I want to tell you a little bit about a few of them so a few years ago we got a lot of data from an online dating company they basically send us all the communication between people all the letters that they were writing to each other the correspondence and we were really excited we thought that this would be riveting reading material some of the most exciting thing you could do but guess what it was one of the most boring thing we had to go through it was unbelievable and people talked about how many brothers and sisters do you have and where did you go to college and what did you study and what's your sign I really boring stuff and there are two possibilities one is that you let people talk about anything they want in an anonymous environment and they choose to speak about the most boring things in the world that's one possibility the second is that we just don't know how to talk to other people so we degradation to the lowest common denominator we try not to offend other people and therefore we talk about things like weather and sports and other boring stuff and so we decided to create our own online dating platform and we created a platform in which people were not allowed to talk about anything they wanted they were restricted to 20 questions and both the people who were asking the question and the people answering knew that these 20 questions were the only things they could talk about and all 20 questions were interesting why did you break up from your previous relationship any sexual fantasies craziness in the family things people really want to know what happened everybody was happier the people who asked the questions were happier because they got meaningful answer a question and answers and the people answering were happier because who wants to retype the resume as a response to an online conversation now the interesting thing for me is that in economics we think about lots of equilibria if you think about places where you and I can meet let's say we decide to go to a restaurant we have to agree to which restaurant we're going to go to and there are many possibilities of restaurants we could go to the question is which one do we choose and I think in regular discourse what happen is that we often choose the things that are not offending anybody but also not interesting for anybody and the interesting idea about online conversation is we can restrict these discussions and we can make some topics unavailable so people cannot reduce the quality of the discussion I think it might also be interesting to do it in cocktail party and the next time you have friends at home how do you eliminate bad discussions from your communication so that was the first thing I wanted to point out the second is in economics there's something called labor analysis and labor analysis is where you take people's all of our attributes height weight education experience and so on and you regress it on our salaries and you try to understand what is it about people that get them to have a higher salary this is the analysis that usually shows that women get 85 cents on a dollar compared to men all else being equal it's very slightly in Israel I'm sure it's much much better than in the US we did the same analysis for online dating we asked the question of what gets people to be successful in online dating what gets people to get their email respondent to other people to write to them and what is it about our attributes height weight education and so on that gets people to be successful in those communications and because we looked at all of people's attributes we could look at multiple at a time so for example it turns out women really care about men's height so I'm five nine imagine I wanted to be as attractive as somebody who's 510 I wanted to be as attractive Madhu's and inch taller than me how much more money would I have to earn a year to make this equal any guesses any guesses it's $40,000 a year just by the way very expensive um now you can ask a question you can ask a women really that's superficial and you can come up with your own answer but one of them is that the interface actually exaggerated the superficiality why because women concert using parameters like men's height and if you put five nine you'll never see men below that height so women do care a lot about men's height but the interface that we're using exaggerate that by the way what do men care about women what what do men care about men care about BMI body mass index and how much do women oh and they like women who are about 19 which is slightly anorexic and how much do women need to earn more a year to be 1 BMI point higher men don't care you can't make enough money to compensate for them okay in another piece of research we looked at what happens when we convey to other people very superficial and general information about ourselves most online dating profiles are very general they don't go into deep details what happens when people see these general abstract description do they like people more do they like them less and what happened is we gain more and more knowledge about people now of course there are some people like our good friends that as we learn more about them we like them more but on average it turns out that as we learn more about people we like them less why because when we have online description of information our brains fills up the missing gaps in over-optimistic way somebody likes sports or they probably like the kind of sports I like somebody like Sumer they probably like the humor I like somebody likes music they probably like the music I like turns out it's unlikely but we fill the gaps in over-optimistic ways and then of course what happened we meet these people for coffee and we get disappointed by the way women get disappointed more than men and they don't seem to learn dating after dating after dating - to fix that the final thing I want to tell you about is that online dating I tremendous hopes for online dating you know dating is complex and difficult finding out somebody you want to spend the rest of your life is a complex issue and online dating is supposed to help we used to have a market maker int that would help us figure out who we should spend time together then there was this time in which the NT went away and people were supposed to find love on their own and which is not very easy and online Danny came is a way to help us there's a new market maker instead of the NT and I was very hopeful that this would actually help this big social problem of how do you find somebody you you care about you want to spend the rest of your life with and when we looked at it it turns out that for every six hours of online dating which is not really dating it's searching it's reading it's corresponding average people get one coffee you know it's not a good trade-off it's as if you draw from here to a Latin and back just for one cup of coffee with somebody it usually doesn't work out very well so the trade-off in terms of intensity of how much time we spend in what we get out of it it's not that fulfilling and we thought about could we improve that situation if we think about this electronic environment is there anything we could do to improve it so we went back and we thought how does dating in the real world looks like and dating in the real world doesn't look like interviewing somebody you don't sit together in a big empty hall and communicate and ask questions and interview the other person know what you usually do is you go to do something together you go to the outside world and you experience something together and we said maybe what happens is that when we experience something together we're able to reflect on the other person in a better way so we created our own version of a virtual dating site we created a version in which people could represent by an avatar and they could go and do stuff together they could go to virtual museums they could go to listen to music and they could talk about stuff they're not talking about each other but they could talk about the world and reflect on that and what happened is that we basically doubled the probability of people wanting to go on a second on the second date so my my summary of all this is that if you think about online dating I think it's one example of a place where we used to have a market and the market went awry by the way there's a very interesting study done on in India in which they took love marriages and they took arranged marriages and of course this was not random assignment some people chose to get married from love some people and they were told to get married by a on command and you look at how happy these a marriages are and what's interesting is that the love marriages start much happier than arranged marriages but the love marriages show decrease over time where the arranged marriages show increase over time and they cross at about year 3 now online dating I think is it we have a real problem in terms of happiness in western world and how in dating I think is big part of it the interesting thing is as we create these markets we can think about how do we create markets that are compatible with what we can do with what how people experience the world and if you think about online dating what happens is you go and you put your profile online and somebody has to guess who you are based on this profile the problem is that these profiles were designed to be easy for computers to process and not for people imagine we do the following experiment imagine I go and I asked you to give me names 1/5 of 20 friends you really like and 20 friends you don't like so much and then I go to these Foley people that ask them to fill an online dating profile without their name and without a picture and then I come back to you and I say please solve them is to these two piles would you be able to people are not able to why because people are experienced goods not information goods when you drink a wine you know whether you like it or not but if I describe the tannin complexity acidity and so on it would not help you and we are much more like wine than we are like digital cameras and because of that I think it's interesting to say if we're going to create a market like an online dating market how do we create it in a way that is compatible with the way that people process information how do we represent people in a way that would help you figure out how these people would taste how if you think about the wine analogy how they would feel when you experience them and not just read their CV online and if we do it right I think it will be very good thank you

Channel: PresidentialConf

Views: 34,478

Rating: 4.942029 out of 5

Keywords: Tomrrow 2013, #tomorrow13, Israeli Presidential Conference, Shimon Peres, Dan Ariely (Author)

Id: eJryWO1Dvvk

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/cabman567]

What's on that list of questions?

[u/Castrate]

"We are more like wine than we are like digital cameras. " I dig it all!

[u/dadschool]

Rad video! Timely for me, haha.

[u/[deleted]]

Facial and body gestures... easily readable signs... and love