Online Dating Blog

A few weeks ago I had mentioned that a study had shown that your appearance in a photo reveals a lot about you. Later I discussed why picking the right photo for your dating profile, even without this study to prove it, is very important.

Newsweek covers this same study in far greater detail in an article called Making a Digital First Impression and a part of the article covered a real-world example of this with online dating. One of the more interesting things covered in Newsweek’s article was that fact that while other people are very good at judging us based on our photos, many times we’re oblivious to the message we’re sending. We might think we look content or confident but other see us as angry or shy. From the article:

Research has shown that people are often clueless about how they’re viewed on the basis of their online profiles. “A lot of the time we think we come across a certain way, but we don’t,” says Simine Vazire, an assistant professor of psychology who runs Washington University’s Personality and Self-Knowledge Lab and an author of the study. “On the Internet, that’s multiplied by a million, so we should be careful about how we broadcast ourselves.”

If that’s true, it’s probably a good idea for everyone who dates online to step back and look at their photos. Look at your photos as if you were looking at a stranger. What do those photos say about you? Make sure the story your pictures are telling is the correct one!

Some interesting points from the article included:

• People were able to judge others based on the photos in 9 of 10 personality traits which included: political orientation, outgoingness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness, likability, self-esteem, loneliness, and religiosity. Kind of crazy. Some of those are fairly surprising to me, like political orientation and religion.
• How you stand and how you smile (or don’t) reveals the biggest clues about who you are.
• Social sites such as Facebook or Myspace reveal even more about your personality. Out-going people have more friends, post more often and so on. The article suggests this might explain why these services are popular: we’re online but we’re still being ourselves.
• Even knowing this information, it’s difficult to influence how people judge you. The article also suggests that a single dating profile photo isn’t going to affect all that much.

Remember, having the right profile photo isn’t about lying. It’s about making sure that you’re telling the truth about who you are.