Everyone has that friend who uses Tinder not so much as a dating app, but as a highly elaborate, military-grade strategy to maximize their chances of getting laid. Apparently there are more of these men out there than we think: Nearly a third of men will swipe right to pretty much anything on Tinder. Way to set the bar high, gentlemen.
This finding comes from a Tinder experiment by the Mirror, which conducted a highly scientific study to determine whether men or women were more picky on the app. They bought a burner phone from the supermarket chain Tesco and set up a fake profile for a 26 year old called “James,” whose profile photo was a picture of Cookie Monster.
After swiping through 958 pictures of 101 men and 104 women aged 18 to 50, the Mirror found that 33 percent of male users swiped right on James, despite the Cookie Monster photo and the fact that their profiles said they were interested in dating women. This number stands in stark contrast to the zero percent—zero percent!—of women who swiped right on James.
From these numbers, the Mirror concluded that men were far less picky than women on Tinder, and that many were swiping right on every single profile without looking. (It could also very well indicate that the men were, in fact, looking at James’s profile, and they simply find Cookie Monster sexier than women do.)
But judging from my own discussions with male friends who use the same “swipe-right-without-looking” stratagem, it seems like it has less to do with not being “picky,” and more to do with the recognition that there are more men than women on most dating apps; so if you’re male, swiping right indiscriminately increases the chance of getting matches. That’s not so much a reflection of the inherent difference between men and women’s attitudes toward online dating, as it is a simple numbers game. But if nothing else, the Mirror’s little Tinder experiment makes me wish there were a Tumblr of Tinder profiles for Sesame Street characters.
H/T The Mirror | Photo by Garry Knight/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0)