[...and at link, interesting comments]
Dan Ariely: My name is Dan Ariely and I’m the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University.
Question: What did you find when you started looking into the world of online dating?
Dan Ariely: I became interested in online dating because one of the people who were sitting in an office next to me was incredibly miserable, and he was an assistant professor; he just moved to the university where I was at; he was spending long hours; he was not finding anybody to date; he was, couldn’t date students at the university, he was a professor; he didn’t have time to go outside. You know, we were not particularly a social bunch, you know, he was basically stuck. And online dating was a very promising way to think about this solution for a marketplace that wasn’t working very well, and he tried online dating and he was just failing miserably, continuously. So that kind of piqued my curiosity about it. And then I started looking at online dating.
So I start looking by registering myself and looking at other people and then I said, let me ask some of my friends to enroll. So I didn’t ask them to really enroll, I just took their profile sheets and asked people, “Could you fill those out but without your name?” And I took people that I liked more and I liked less, and I took their profile and I tried to figure out could I tell the difference? …
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