Revel: Dating Meets Discovery

Like most dating apps, Revel lets you set filters so your matches fit specific criteria—say, within a certain age range or below a given height. Filters feel empowering. They give us control over who we see and help us move more quickly through the crowd. If we already know what qualities in a partner will make us happy, filters should make it easier to find the right match. But do we actually know what we want—or need? A growing body of psychology research suggests we don't. Take the strongest preferences people claim to hold—their non-negotiables. Some traits are cast as dealbreakers, others as must-have dealmakers. Yet these preferences play only a weak role in who we find attractive, who we feel connected to, and who we end up with.1,2 People often compromise on the very attributes they once insisted were dealbreakers. More striking still: even when someone checks all our must-have boxes, that doesn't predict whether we feel drawn to them when we meet, or whether the relationship will make us happy in the long run.3,4 Why is this? One possibility is that we filter on superficial traits—things that are easy to see or list—that don't actually predict whether two people have chemistry or connection.5 And we are most prone to do this when evaluating many options at once, as on a dating app.6,7 The more we lean on checklists, the more we risk overriding our intuitive sense of whether someone feels right. That intuition may be a better guide.8 In truth, scientists still don't know what predicts lasting compatibility between two people, so there isn't strong evidence about which qualities are worth filtering on.9,10 What we do know is that filters can be useful when the sheer number of profiles feels overwhelming—too many options can wear us down and make decision-making harder.11,12 On Revel, that problem is already partly addressed by limiting how many profiles you can view in a day. And of course by only showing UM matches we are already applying a strong filter right from the start. Beyond that, we leave the filtering up to you!

Viewing and swiping on profiles is a common feature of most online dating apps, including Revel. Profiles provide an opportunity to make thin slice judgments, which prior work in social psychology suggests can be both accurate and influential when forming first impressions.1,2 But what are people evaluating when they view a profile? What features of the profile are feeding into initial impressions that sway people into swiping left or right? The profiles on Revel have photos and a bio (i.e., information self-reported by users). It's no secret that physical attraction is a key element people use to evaluate potential partners.3,4,5 But people infer more than just attractiveness from profile pictures. Research examining social media profile pictures has found that people who smiled or showed more positive emotions in their photo were viewed as having more positive personality traits.6,7 Within an online dating app pool, the most attractive people get pursued by "everyone," including those less attractive than them.8,9 Thus, the photos dating app users choose to display matter, for the pursuer and the pursued. Less is known about how bios influence dating decisions, in part because there is so much variability in how people put bios together and what information they choose to display.10 Although some research has shown that photos are more important than bios in decision-making online,10,11 bios still offer a non-negligible amount of information users draw upon to perceive someone's personality, assess similarity, and infer effort or interest.12 For example, having more typos on one's bio leads to being perceived as less attractive and intelligent, and subsequently, worse dating outcomes.13 When we designed Revel, we intentionally kept the photos and bio separate. So, when you view a profile, clicking into someone's photos is different than clicking into their bio. This will allow us to untangle the importance of photos versus bios when evaluating profiles, and gain more clarity into what type of bios (e.g., what specific info, length) do the best. People use different pieces of information to make dating decisions, and we want to know how these pieces affect dating decisions on Revel.