Tinder is a Waste of Time:
Tinder is a Waste of Time, If your goal is to get more dates, dating apps won’t help you much. You would probably do as well or as badly without it as you would with it.
“Tinder doesn’t offer much in the way of new opportunities for people who don’t have one-night stands without using it,” says Trond Viggo Grntvedt, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at NTNU.
He is the first author of a new article about Tinder in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science. If you don’t have much luck outside of Tinder, you probably won’t have much luck on Tinder either.
Grntvedt says that the number of one-night stands doesn’t go up much for people who already have sexual relationships outside of Tinder.
Both ways, the same people win.
Professor Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair from the Department of Psychology at NTNU says that most people who do well on Tinder also have casual sex and hook-ups with people they don’t know well.
Researchers have already found that using Tinder didn’t cause more one-night stands.
Associate Professor Mons Bendixen, also from NTNU’s Department of Psychology, says, “We haven’t found much evidence that dating apps make people have more short-term sexual relationships than they did before.”
So, no one has any moral reason to be upset about it.
Swiping
Tinder is one of many apps that help people find dates. It uses location services to find other users who are nearby and then tries to pair them up.
It’s easy and effective to choose someone because their picture and some information pop up on the screen. If you swipe to the left, it means you don’t want to meet up. If you swipe right, it means you want to meet the person. The app can help two people meet if they both swipe right on each other.
But swiping and searching on Tinder doesn’t work very well for the vast majority of users, who are more likely to have better luck meeting real people.
Needs a lot of hits
Tinder needs a lot of hits before it can lead to a meeting. And even more, hits are needed before any kind of relationship can happen, whether it’s a one-night stand or meeting someone with the goal of having a long-term, committed relationship.
Tinder and other dating apps are used in different ways by men and women. Most women take more time to look at potential matches and are more likely to be looking for a relationship. Most men, on the other hand, look at potential matches more quickly and swipe right a lot more often, hoping that if they do it enough times, they’ll get at least one hit.
80 percent don’t get anything done.
About 20% of the people who used Tinder went on one-night stands. The vast majority of them had only experienced this once. So, eight out of ten people who use the app never have sex again.
Kennair says that Tinder may give people new sexual opportunities, but it seems like there aren’t very many of them.
Only seven people, or between two and three percent of the people who took part in the study, had only one-night stands with people they met on Tinder. The rest were able to do this by using traditional ways to date.
Age and personality matter.
Participants were asked to rate how attractive they thought they were physically. The amount of short-term sex that Tinder users have can be predicted by how physically attractive they are.
“But this also applies when you’re not using dating apps. Some people get a lot, while others don’t get anything,” “says Kennair.
“How often you end up having a one-night stand after using Tinder depends on your age and how you feel about casual sex. But these same things also play a role in other places, Grntvedt says.
Casual sex will happen more often if you feel more comfortable with it.
Bendixen says that there is also a link between a high interest in short-term sex encounters and a lower chance of meeting someone interested in a long-term relationship through a dating app.
Long-term relationships don’t work either.
On average, women who use Tinder are more interested in long-term relationships than men who use the app. This is also true for meetings that do not involve dating apps.
But this and other studies show that Tinder is not a great way to find a long-term partner either.
The idea for this study came from Ernst Olav Botnen. He is a clinical psychologist at the Lovisenberg Diakonale Hospital in Oslo at the moment.
Botnen says that it’s interesting to see how behavior in other places, like bars and nightclubs, shows up in dating apps.
62% of the 269 people in the study who were or had been Tinder users were women.
Botnen says, “Since the people we chose are college students in their early 20s, it will be interesting to see if our results hold true for other groups and age ranges in future research.”
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