People tend to message people who are more desirable than them, so you better hope they don’t know it.
Kicking out the first message on a dating app is always an intimidating prospect, and you might feel especially dumb if the person never writes back. But according to new research, your inclination to message first may mean you are trying to hook someone out of your league.
According to research published Wednesday in Science Advances, people tend to initiate online conversation with people who are at least 25 percent more desirable than they are, based on how many initial messages they they received from other users and how “desirable” those users were themselves. Men tend to be even more aspirational than women when sending a first message. But there is only up to a 21 percent chance that the woman a man messages will write back, and that number drops as the desirability gap widens.
The paper analyzed data from heterosexual users of an unspecified “popular, free online dating service” in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle from . The highest ranked person in all four cities was a 30-year-old woman in New York City, who received 1504 messages during the period of observation, the equivalent of one message every 30 minutes for the entire month.
“It’s very hard to observe failed overtures offline,” Elizabeth Bruch, an associate professor in sociology at the University of Michigan and the paper’s lead author, told The Outline. But online dating, she and her colleagues write in the paper, provides “an unprecedented opportunity” to see how people approach those who reject them.
If you message first in online dating, you might be punching above your weight
“Rather than relying on guesses about what people find attractive,” she said, the approach also allowed the researchers to define desirability in terms of who is receiving the most attention and from whom, said Mark Newman, a professor of physics and complex systems, and the paper’s co-author, in a statement. Lees verder