Originality in online dating profile texts made the owner appear more intelligent, attractive, and worth a try

Originality in online dating profile texts: How does perceived originality affect impression formation and what makes a text original? Tess van der Zanden ,Alexander P. Schouten,Maria B. J. Mos,Emiel J. Krahmer. PLOS One, October 19, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274860

Abstract: This paper investigates origins and consequences of perceived profile text originality. The first goal was to examine whether the perceived originality of authentic online dating profile texts affects online daters’ perceptions of attractiveness, and whether perceptions of (less) desired partner personality traits mediate this effect. Results showed the positive impact of perceived profile text originality on impression formation: text originality positively affects perceptions of intelligence and sense of humor, which improve impressions of attractiveness and boost dating intention. The second goal was to explore what profile text features increase perceptions of profile text originality. Results revealed profile texts which were stylistically original (e.g., include metaphors) and contained more and concrete self-disclosure statements were considered more original, explaining almost half of the variance in originality scores. Taken together, our results suggest that perceived originality in profile texts is manifested in both meaning and form, and is a balancing act between novelty and appropriateness.

General discussion

As far as we are aware, this is the first study that has focused on perceived originality in online dating profiles. In the perception study, we first investigated the effects of perceived profile text originality on impression formation. This was done by presenting actual users of web-based dating sites with dating profiles which they evaluated on the profile’s originality and the profile owner’s personality and attractiveness. Next, we conducted a content analysis to explore what characteristics in a dating profile text increase perceptions of profile text originality.

Results of the perception study show that higher scores on perceived intelligence and sense of humor mediate the positive relationship between perceived profile text originality and impressions of attractiveness and dating intention (H1 and H2). This positive correlation of perceived originality, intelligence, sense of humor, and attractiveness accords with correlations found in prior studies [26–28]. Contrary to the expectations in H3, we found that higher originality scores lead to lower rather than higher oddness scores. In line with our expectation, profile owners scoring higher on perceived oddness scored lower on attractiveness and dating intention.

The perception study data showed thus that, overall, perceptions of profile text originality positively affect impressions of the profile owner’s personality and attractiveness, but the content analysis provides insights into what profile text characteristics could increase these text originality perceptions. Our results reveal that primarily stylistic and self-disclosure features predicted higher text originality scores. It seems that profiles that were perceived as more original were more likely to contain fixed and novel metaphors (stylistic features), and more and concrete self-disclosures (self-disclosure features). Finally, profiles deemed original were less likely to be (fully) written from a self-perspective (perspective-taking feature).

Implications and directions for future research

This study yields several implications for theory and future studies on (the effects of) originality. First, our study reveals that a general consensus exists among the online dating site users of this study about what profile texts are original and not. Moreover, the participants showed high agreement on the owners of which profiles were considered odd, and these profiles scored low on originality. Consistent with the two-dimensional concept of creativity [12], this finding suggests that, without being instructed to do so, online daters apply novelty and appropriateness criteria to assess a profile’s originality; only profiles that are both novel and appropriate are considered original, profiles that are just novel are not. This raises the question where to draw the line between profiles that are novel but not appropriate, profiles that are appropriate but not novel, and profiles that are both novel and appropriate. A future study could investigate this by asking participants to evaluate the perceived novelty and appropriateness of a large set of texts instead of the text’s overall perceived originality.

Second, the results of the perception study show that online daters use profile originality as a cue to form impressions about profile owners. More specifically, it seems that a profile’s originality primarily leads to positive impressions, both with regard to perceptions about the profile owner’s personality (higher scores on intelligence and sense of humor), and the profile owner’s attractiveness and participants’ dating intentions. This positive effect of originality on impression formation is further corroborated by the finding that perceived originality did not lead to higher scores on perceptions of the less desired trait oddness. Originality may thus be seen as a positive characteristic of a dating profile, which accords with previous interview studies in which online daters expressed negative attitudes towards dating profiles lacking originality [16,17]. However, as the participants of the present study were older adults who are members of dating platforms on which the textual component on a dating profile plays a prominent role, these results need to be corroborated among younger samples as younger adults are often more inclined to use dating applications with more picture-based dating profiles. It would be interesting to investigate how different dating demographics define and appreciate originality in dating profile texts.

Third, the results of the exploratory content analysis suggest that originality is a multifaceted construct in online dating: perceptions of text originality are affected by choices of form (stylistic features) as well as meaning (self-disclosure statements). This suggests that in addition to a multidimensional construct (i.e., novel and appropriate), originality is manifested through both meaning and form characteristics in dating profiles. Future research should examine how the criteria of novelty and appropriateness on the one hand, and meaning and form on the other hand, relate to each other. For example, stylistic features may be form characteristics that can boost a profile’s novelty, while self-disclosure features may be meaning characteristics that are added to satisfy appropriateness criteria. The latter assumption builds upon an earlier study that suggested that online daters reveal personal information to conform with contextual expectations [24].

Our findings may well extend to other text genres, such as job application letters or consumer-to-consumer advertisements. There, text originality may also be a balancing act between novelty and appropriateness. Moreover, it is also likely that in these and other texts, originality is not only defined by form, but also by certain meaning characteristics that are specific to the context. For example, a consumer-to-consumer advertisement should not only be original in form, but should perhaps also always contain specific product information in order to be perceived as original. Whether these assumptions hold in other contexts though, is up for future studies.

Fourth, this study has shown that it is possible to assess perceived text originality from authentic profile texts based on content analytical features. Our methodological approach offers opportunities for other research aiming to investigate what constitutes originality in texts and how perceived originality affects evaluations. With the features coded in this study, we were able to explain nearly half of the variation in perceived profile text originality scores, and particularly the manually-coded features were important in this. A next challenge would be to examine whether automated measures of the manual-coded features of this study that seemed to indicate perceived text originality, could be developed using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, such as feature extraction and language modeling.

The use of authentic online dating profile texts is thus one of the study’s strengths. At the same time, ethical issues can and should be taken into consideration when using authentic texts. When conducting this study, we had obtained ethical approval of our local REDC, and we made every effort to ensure that sentences and phrases used in our stimuli could not be traced back to the original writers. Nevertheless, a debate has emerged in social sciences recently (e.g., [72]): can people’s online texts be used for scientific analyses, even when these texts are publicly available, if the writers of those texts are not aware of this? There is no simple answer to this, and much depends on the specific online platform and the exact purpose of the study. This is an important consideration for future studies looking into communicative practices in online communicative settings, ranging from BTL reader comments on news sites to online dating.