Psychology professor Jeffrey Lohr and two psychology graduates, Aimee King and Deena Austin-Oden, analyzed several leading dating Web sites and found that promotional claims were more self-serving opinion than legitimate psychological science.
The researchers explored the advertising tactics of matchmaking that existed long before the invention of online dating sites and the Web. For example, many of the matchmaking sites use anecdotes and personal testimonies in advertising in the hope that consumers will accept the endorsement as fact.
Consumers must be cautious of customer satisfaction testimonies in online dating advertisements because the matchmaking sites have most likely pre-selected only satisfied customers, rather than a representative sample, the team said. The researchers said that opinions expressed during the honeymoon period should not be compared to the opinions of couples after the honeymoon is over.
The eHarmony technique is the only one of the leading matchmaking sites that has a patent on its compatibility tests. Thus, eHarmony does not reveal to users the characteristics of their key attributes or the way in which those attributes are related to the people with whom they are matched.
The Mate Choice Study is a matching system used by another site, Chemistry. Its structure is similar in form and content to the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which divides people into psychological types. For the Chemistry. There are Explorers and Builders, who tend to gravitate toward their own type based on similarity, and Directors and Negotiators, who gravitate on the basis of complementarities.
