David Kirk

This paper investigates the decisions made by participants during speeddating events. The success of speed-dating relies on its ability to produce ‘perfect matches’ during an event. Predicting these provides a challenge and the benefits of the ability to do so would be of value to speed-dating organisations and more universally in understanding the factors that help or hinder the development of trust. Research in the field, such as the work of Fisman et al1, has shown some gender preference in… Show more

This paper investigates the decisions made by participants during speeddating events. The success of speed-dating relies on its ability to produce ‘perfect matches’ during an event. Predicting these provides a challenge and the benefits of the ability to do so would be of value to speed-dating organisations and more universally in understanding the factors that help or hinder the development of trust. Research in the field, such as the work of Fisman et al1, has shown some gender preference in speed-dating scenarios. Research suggests that women become more selective in large speed-dating groups, but so far little work has been done to assess the effect of time in such decisions. Literature in the development of trust suggests that it can take as little as 30 seconds (Willis and Todorov, 20062 and Ambady and Rosenthal, 19933) to form a first impression of a person.

Here I perform an experiment to assess decisions made during two timed sessions of varying length in conjunction with the information provided by a self-rating questionnaire in order to try and establish more accuracy in the predictability of so called ‘perfect matches’. The results show that a longer interaction time increases the rate of return. Moreover, results compiled from comparing information collected through self-rating questionnaires show a correlation between certain self-assessed attributes in ‘perfect matches’, which provides indication of assortative mating. Potentially, this represents an important and illuminative insight not just for the growing ‘dating’ industry but also for organisations selecting personnel for specific tasks. More broadly, the results contribute to the greater discussion in hand; literature on the development of trust (Gachter and Falk, 20024).
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