Remember that personal growth is one of those hallmarks that tends to make long-term relationships work. He suggests not drawing out the pre-face-to-face meeting for too long. Chaudhry says his research suggests keeping online, pre-meeting exchanges to two weeks or shorter.

And actually make an effort to get to know someone. Kolmes suggests checking in with yourself regularly. Don't miss: Got swiping fatigue? Want more tips like these? NBC News BETTER is obsessed with finding easier, healthier and smarter ways to live. Sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram.

IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. SKIP TO CONTENT. News NBC News NOW Nightly News Meet the Press Dateline MSNBC TODAY Search. Better Logo. Share this —. Finally, the nicknames retrieved in step 1 were analyzed linguistically or, to be more precise, morphologically i. The research reported in our manuscript meets the ethical guidelines of the German Society of Psychology Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie, DGPs and is consistent with the principles of research ethics as published by the American Psychological Association APA.

Data collection was completely anonymous. That is, except for standard information e. All participants in the studies were clearly instructed that they would give their consent by virtue of survey completion. The research reported here had not been approved by a local ethics committee because the ethical guidelines of the German Society of Psychology do not require ethical approval of basic psychological studies involving simple behavioral data.

In both steps we used a German ten-item short version BFI of the Big Five Inventory BFI Rammstedt and John, This well-known and established instrument shows sufficient psychometric properties Rammstedt and John, The Big Five dimensions were: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism McCrae and John, Narcissism was assessed with three items on a 9-point scale taken from the German dark triad short scale Küfner et al.

For step 2, the items assessing personality and mating strategy were reformulated from first to third person. Online daters at the dating website finya. de were contacted and their participation solicited using standardized private text messages that included a link to the step 1 questionnaire.

We posted the link also on Facebook in order to enlist additional participants. Inclusion criteria here were that the potential participants were dating online and were using a nickname while online dating. Exclusion criterion for step 1 was homosexual orientation. This was done because of our focus on mate choice research that has, due to a high prevalence of heterosexuality, mainly investigated heterosexual mate choice see Buss, Also, research has shown that both the preferred mate choice criteria as well as the actual mate choice of heterosexual people differ from homosexual people e.

The final sample 1 contained 69 non-homosexual participants 68 heterosexual, 1 bisexual; 36 female, 33 male with an average age of Answering the item asking for the pursued mating strategy was voluntary. In our second step we used reformulated items from step 1 for the questionnaire.

For all ratings in step 2, 5-point rating scales were used in order to make the questionnaires consistent for our participants in this respect. For sample 2, we decided, in order to not fatigue our participants, to present a randomly drawn sample of 10 nicknames below each item instead of all 69 nicknames.

Our target was 60 ratings per nickname on each item with a balanced sex ratio. This led to a planned sample size of participants. On average, each nickname was thus rated on every item by approx.

Fourteen participants reported a homosexual orientation 3. For the analyses referring to RQs , those homosexual participants were excluded due to the reason elaborated on above. The non-homosexual sample consisted of participants female, male with an average age of In order to investigate whether people would be able to detect the mating strategy of a nickname user RQ1 , an additional sample sample 3 of 94 non-homosexual participants 63 female, 31 male with an average age of As we were also interested in people's contact motivation as a function of nickname RQ2 , we recruited another sample sample 4 of a total of participants 65 female, 65 males with an average age of For RQ4, we looked at different parameters of pseudonym length cf.

Following the procedure by Back et al. These attributes, however, were extremely rare in our sample M s between 0. The analyses for H1 and RQs were performed by means of correlational analyses Pearson's r. The analyses for RQ4 included correlational analyses as well as mediational analyses using the PROCESS macro for SPSS Statistics. Following the recommendations by Hayes , bootstrapping analyses were performed for investigating the mediations. Also, t -tests and chi-square tests were performed for RQ4.

In the results section, significance values are reported one-tailed for H1 and two-tailed for RQs , if not stated otherwise. As parts of our research were exploratory e.

Following Back et al. Still, as our sample size was only 69, we will focus on effect sizes rather than on statistical significance. For all statistical analyses, the nicknames and their users were used as cases in SPSS. In sum, H1 was thus mostly supported. Figure 1 gives a visual summary of the findings with respect to H1. Table 1 shows all obtained intercorrelations between self-reported and judged personality, self-reported and judged mating strategy, contact motivation, and the linguistic length parameters.

Figure 1. Correlation coefficients between nickname users' self-reported personality dimensions and participants' personality judgments based on nicknames. Op, Openness to experience; Co, Conscientiousness; Ex, Extraversion; Ag, Agreeableness; Ne, Neuroticism; Na, Narcissism.

Table 1. Intercorrelations among the personality dimensions, and the mating strategy of the nickname users self-reported and judged , the contact motivation of the participants, and the linguistic attributes of the nicknames. Openness and extraversion were the two personality dimensions that were judged correctly with the highest accuracy see Figure 1.

We found several correlations between nickname length and the nickname users' personality see Table 1. So, nickname length could be a simple cue for estimating the personality of the nickname user RQ4. Hence, we conducted mediational analyses. The self-reported personality score for openness or extraversion entered the analysis as predictor, judged personality score as outcome variable and the length parameters as mediators.

That means the number of morphemes was used as a cue for correct openness judgments. Hence, the correlation between self-reported and judged openness can be explained by number of morphemes.

It is noteworthy that the correlation between both self-reported and judged openness and number of morphemes was negative see Table 1. This means that nickname shortness can be used as a cue for the nickname user's openness.

For extraversion, no significant mediation was found. This difference was not significant, but yielded at least a small effect size. Furthermore, see Table 1 , people seeking a short-term relationship used longer nicknames RQ4. So, we investigated, whether the length parameters were cues that were used for correct mating strategy judgments. No significant mediation was found. Indeed, no length parameter correlated with rated mating strategy see Table 1. Hence, there might be linguistic-morphological cues to one's mating strategy that are not perceived as such.

Our data concerning H1 show that ratings on people's personality simply based on those people's nicknames were valid. Still, the respective correlations were far from perfect. So we asked whether contact motivation was related to supposed personality scores rather than real scores. Hence, we correlated the contact motivation of women and men sample 4 with the personality judgments by other women and men sample 2.

Figure 2 presents a graphical summary of the findings for contact motivation. Figure 2. Correlation coefficients of participants' contact motivation with a nickname users' self-reported personality dimensions and b participants' personality judgments based on nicknames: intersexual left: women rating men, right: men rating women. Furthermore, it seemed of interest to investigate whether self-reported mating strategy of the nickname users would correlate with the contact motivation of our participants.

Also of interest is the finding that our judging participants were reluctant to contact persons who used relatively long pseudonyms see Table 1. It seemed worthwhile to investigate intersexual judgments i.

Also, intrasexual judgments women judging women, men judging men might be of interest i. First, we analyzed intersexual personality judgments. We checked again which linguistic cues RQ4 were used for correctly judging the personality dimensions. Figure 3 gives a visual summary of the intersexual judgments. Figure 3. Correlation coefficients between nickname users' self-reported personality dimensions and participants' personality judgments based on nicknames: intersexual left: women rating men, right: men rating women.

We checked for linguistic cues mediating the correct judgments of extraversion and agreeableness RQ4. Figure 4 gives a visual summary of the intrasexual personality judgments. Figure 4. Correlation coefficients between nickname users' self-reported personality dimensions and participants' personality judgments based on nicknames: intrasexual left: women rating women, right: men rating men. A visual comparison of Figures 3 , 4 indicates that, by trend, women were better in intersexual judgments, while men were better in intrasexual judgments.

The other side of this mate-choice medal might simply be that male nicknames are more telling than female ones. When investigating personality dimensions separately, we found a sex difference in intersexual as well as intrasexual judgments.

Put simply, the results show that agreeableness could be inferred from male but not from female nicknames. Also, as earlier research has shown, women tend to use diminutive suffixes in their pseudonyms. In our sample, 11 out of 36 female nicknames contained such a suffix compared to 6 out of 33 for male nicknames.

Research shows that many different cues can be used to make valid judgments on people's personality. Such cues include, for instance, features of someone's bedroom Gosling et al. It does not surprise that studies have also investigated cues to people's personality in the online world for an overview see Tskhay and Rule, The concrete aspects thus studied include personal websites Vazire and Gosling, , online social networking sites Buffardi and Campbell, ; Back et al.

Online, people act in relative anonymity and some social cues available in ftf encounters are missing there. Hence, it is of relevance to investigate which of the available cues be employed to get a proper idea of a person's personality. We were able to replicate findings of the research by Back et al.

Thus, nicknames contain valid information about their users, which is somewhat surprising, as a nickname constitutes only a small piece of linguistic material.

One difference between the study by Back et al. and ours is that in our study the highest correlation between self-reported and judged personality dimensions was for extraversion, whereas in the other study extraversion had the least accurate judgments.

Similar to our results, other studies on personality judgments based on available cues have also found that extraversion is one of the traits that are detected particularly well e. Another personality trait that was detected relatively well in our study was openness to experience. This fits quite well with the results of other personality judgment studies too. For instance, in the study by Gosling et al.

The same was found by Vazire and Gosling , when investigating personality judgments based on personal websites, by Rentfrow and Gosling in their study on judging personality based on music preferences, in the study by Küfner et al. In their study on facebook profiles, Back et al. So, why are extraversion and openness detectable so well? The fact that extraversion manifests itself in the form of outgoing behavior and self-expression McCrae and John, might already be one part of the answer. When extraversion has a strong outgoing as well as social-communicative dimension, it does not surprise that it was detected relatively well.

For openness, finding an explanation is more difficult. Contrary to extraversion, openness is not a very interpersonal personality dimension. It rather contains features such as a sense for aesthetics and an active imagination, both of which—and this might the answer after all—might have been strongly at work when creating the nickname.

Another difference between the study by Back et al. The question arises, whether how telling a nickname is differs with the context. It might be that in a context like mate choice in which good impression management is crucial Whitty and Buchanan, , nicknames tend to contain somewhat more information than in rather unexceptional contexts. Women, though not men, were able to correctly detect these negative traits in potential mates.

So the following might be true: People do not want to hide behind their nickname. And, possibly even more importantly, they cannot hide to start with—unfavorable traits shine through, too.

It was of interest to investigate which linguistic cues are used to judge the nickname users' personality. As to morphological cues, we only found one significant mediation. So, it might be that semantic cues are more revealing than morphological ones. Also, morphological cues can be misleading, as number of syllables correlated substantially both with judged openness and judged narcissism, while both self-reported openness and narcissism were uncorrelated with number of syllables see Table 1.

Neither of the sexes was generally better than the other in correctly guessing nickname users' personality. A closer look at the data, however, revealed the tendency that women were better than men in intersexual judgments, whereas men were better than women in intrasexual judgments. Considering the wealth of research that demonstrates women to be choosier than men in mate choice decisions as well as the particularly intense intrasexual competition among men Buss, , this finding is understandable.

In particular, we found that women could detect agreeableness in potential mates. Men were able to detect it in potential rivals.

One explanation for this particular finding might be the following: Aggressive and abusive mates are particularly dangerous for women see Buss, Indeed, women prefer considerate, kind, and understanding mates Buss and Barnes, , and those low in dominance as a long-term mate Ahmetoglu and Swami, One might conclude that as the choosier sex women are good at detecting traits in a mate that might pose a risk to them.

Men being the sex with a particularly intense intrasexual competition might be good in checking up on other men with respect to traits that are indicative of competition and subsequently aggression and violence. Alternatively, one might argue that male nicknames are simply more telling than female ones. That is correct, but it leaves the question unanswered why exactly male nicknames seem to contain more information than female ones.

So, female intersexual selection and male intrasexual competition remains a good explanation. We found that mating strategy was detectable, too. This was significant for female nicknames being judged by men, but not vice versa to the same degree.

This finding was surprising, as it could have been assumed that women, especially those interested in a high-quality long-term mate, should be interested in identifying men who are only looking for a fling in order to avoid these men. Furthermore, those motives moderated the association between cyber and in-person sexual victimization. Discussion: The results of the study imply that a history of childhood maltreatment is a risk factor for sexual victimization in adulthood among young heterosexual women who use online dating.

Future studies should aim at replicating these associations prospectively.

Reis studies social interactions and the factors that influence the quantity and closeness of our relationships. He coauthored a review article that analyzed how psychology can explain some of the online dating dynamics. You may have read a short profile or you may have had fairly extensive conversations via text or email. Her research currently focuses on online dating, including a study that found that age was the only reliable predictor of what made online daters more likely to actually meet up.

Where online dating differs from methods that go farther back are the layers of anonymity involved. If you meet someone via a friend or family member, just having that third-party connection is a way of helping validate certain characteristics about someone physical appearance, values, personality traits, and so on. Do you make one another laugh?

Study after psychological study support that those types of principles are important in relationships , and are predictors of relationship success, he notes. Online dating is a way to open doors to meet and date people, Reis says. And one thing the apps and sites have going for them is that ability to simply help you meet more people.

Sameer Chaudhry, MD, an internist at the University of North Texas in Dallas, coauthored a BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine paper for which he and his coauthor considered nearly 4, studies across psychology, sociology, neurocognitive science, and other disciplines to come up with a series of guidelines for how to set up a profile, how to select matches, and how to approach online interactions.

Setting up a dating profile a certain way is by no means a guarantee for meeting the love of your life. Be selective. Some apps have a reputation for being hookup apps; others are designed to connect users of the same religion or some other shared hobby or attribute. Research shows that people tend to fall for people similar to themselves when it comes to things like relationship history, desire for children, pet preferences, and religion. Being honest about what you want and who you are makes it more likely that the people you end up talking to and meeting are people things might work out with, Hallam says.

Photos should accurately depict your physical appearance — but they should be photos you generally like, Hallam says. Specific attributes that generally increase attractiveness and likeability, according to his research, were: a genuine smile one that makes your eyes start to crinkle up and a slight head tilt.

People swipe through profiles quickly. State things that are really important to you and be done with it. People tend to be interested in interesting people. Remember that personal growth is one of those hallmarks that tends to make long-term relationships work. He suggests not drawing out the pre-face-to-face meeting for too long. Chaudhry says his research suggests keeping online, pre-meeting exchanges to two weeks or shorter. And actually make an effort to get to know someone. Kolmes suggests checking in with yourself regularly.

Don't miss: Got swiping fatigue? Want more tips like these? NBC News BETTER is obsessed with finding easier, healthier and smarter ways to live.

Sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram. IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. SKIP TO CONTENT. News NBC News NOW Nightly News Meet the Press Dateline MSNBC TODAY Search. Better Logo. Share this —. NBC News Logo. Follow better. More from NBC News Think. About Contact Help Careers Ad Choices Privacy Policy Do Not Sell My Personal Information CA Notice Terms of Service NBC News Sitemap Advertise Select Shopping Select Personal Finance © NBCNEWS.

Search Search. Facebook Twitter Email SMS Print Whatsapp Reddit Pocket Flipboard Pinterest Linkedin. March 16, , AM UTC. Related Do It BETTER. Do It BETTER How to use dating apps after I figured out the secret to dating in a digital world April 30,

CrossRef Full Text Google Scholar. In the results section, significance values are reported one-tailed for H1 and two-tailed for RQs , if not stated otherwise. H1: People are able to correctly guess online daters' personality by means only of their nicknames. We checked again which linguistic cues RQ4 were used for correctly judging the personality dimensions. However, we should be cautious when interpreting our results. About Contact Help Careers Ad Choices Privacy Policy Do Not Sell My Personal Information CA Notice Terms of Service NBC News Sitemap Advertise Select Shopping Select Personal Finance © NBCNEWS.

Categories:

• Best dating
• Dating website
• Free apps
• Dating sites
• Dating apps