February 7, 2007

Users Of Online Dating Services Often Fib

A study of users of four popular online dating services found that a majority lied about their weight, and many lied about their height.

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February 7, 2007 -- Users Of Online Dating Services Often Fib

This shocking news just in: people advertising themselves on online dating services lie! That’s the alarming finding of a study coming out in April in the journal Proceedings of Computer/Human Interaction. The study examined 40 men and 40 women who were using the popular web dating services Match.com, Yahoo Personals, American Singles or Webdate. And here are the horrifying numbers: 53 percent of the men and 39 percent of the women lied about their height. 64 percent of the women and 61 percent of the men lied about their weight. Interestingly, lies about age were far less common—24 percent of men and only 13 percent of women fibbed about how old they were. Too bad they didn’t ask about occupations. Somebody I know—okay, okay, it was me—went to dinner with a woman who had described herself on a website as a professional actress. Turned out she was a serving wench at a Renaissance festival. Yeesh. Anyway, in the time since the data for this study were collected, most dating sites have moved to describing a general body type rather than a specific weight. Nevertheless, let the browser beware.

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