From The New York Times
Love, Lies and What They Learned
Stephanie Rosenbloom
There are millions of Americans seeking love on the Internet. Little do they know that teams of scientists are eagerly watching them trying to find it.
Like contemporary Margaret Meads, these scholars have gathered data from dating sites like Match.com, OkCupid and Yahoo! Personals to study attraction, trust, deception — even the role of race and politics in prospective romance....
Andrew T. Fiore, a data scientist at Facebook and a former visiting assistant professor at Michigan State University [and a 2010 Ph.D. alumnus of the School of Information], said that unlike laboratory studies, “online dating provides an ecologically valid or true-to-life context for examining the risks, uncertainties and rewards of initiating real relationships with real people at an unprecedented scale.”
“As more and more of life happens online, it’s less and less the case that online is a vacuum,” he added. “It is life.”...
What people say they want in a mate and what qualities they actually seek don’t tend to correspond,” said Coye Cheshire, an associate professor at the School of Information at Berkeley who has studied this with Mr. Fiore, Professor Mendelsohn and Lindsay Shaw Taylor, a member of the school’s self, identity and relationships lab....