Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In speed-dating, the selectivity of liking a partner is relatively constant across events, but individuals change to faster, non-compensatory decision-making strategies to evaluate partners. Online, individuals have more romantic options, whichcan also lead the use of non-compensatory decision-making strategies. Some studies have also found lower selectivity inlarger choice sets. These patterns should accelerate as cognitive load increases over the course of the experiment, with lesstime and lower selectivity for partner choice as search continues. We tested this hypothesis using a popular, mobile-baseddating application. Forty users spent five minutes evaluating and liking or disliking a sequential stream of real profileswithin the application. We compared the ratio of likes to dislikes and time spent evaluating individual profiles and foundthat users spent nearly identical amounts of time evaluating individual profiles and similar levels of selectivity over thecourse of the experiment. We compare our results to speed-dating.