Oz Dating

Here's yet another example of a dating site being used as a tool for psychological research. This time researches used one to find out if members were mostly attracted to others in their own "league" of desirability, or not. The Berkeley researchers drew this conclusion from their study of 3000 members: "Individuals on the dating market will assess their own self-worth and select partners whose social desirability approximately equals their own."

Maybe their results do measure people's genuine attraction to others. But they might also just show that they are just being more realistic in their choices of who they might want to be with. Either way, they show how powerful social conditioning and environmental factors are in dating and courting behaviour.