(Mark Brooks interviews the former editor of Psychology Today, and co-formulator of the defunct online dating site Engage.com.)
Q. There is definitely a limited deck of cards that we have to play with. What site would you say gets closer to doing a good job of this thing called matchmaking?
I’m not a big fan of any of the existing sites. The biggest ones are, what I call “long bars” – bars hundreds of miles long which allow you an endless shopping spree. They have some use, but they make it hard to zoom in on people with whom you can build a great relationship. That brings me to eHarmony and PerfectMatch, where they do some personality testing. The problem here is no one really knows how to do that kind of matching very well. People I’ve talked to who have used eHarmony have said that most of the people they met seem to be completely random people. They didn’t seem to fit them in any special way.
These tests are very crude. The biggest problem with eHarmony especially is, what I call the False Negative Problem. If they really use your test score to match you up with people, then there are a lot of people that they’re not introducing you to – people with whom you could be very happy. Sometimes people who are very similar are attracted to each other and create a relationship, but sometimes opposites really do attract and can also create wonderful relationships. The tests cannot possibly deal with both possibilities. They don’t know whether you fit the rule or the exception.
Call me cynical if you like, but tests like eHarmony’s are mainly marketing tools. Some people believe that if you’re testing the heck out of them, you must know something.
Do you like this article? Post a comment on Facebook