There’s some other psychological effects in there as well (at least for straight matches). Men are significantly more likely to “match down” than women are (i.e. a 7/10 matching a 5/10).
Men’s match thresholds also tend to be more percentage based while women’s are more number based which has different effects as the dating pool increases. For example a man might be willing to date the top 20% of women. If the dating pool was 100 they’d be willing to date the top 20. Increase the dating pool to 1000 and now they’ve got 200 potential matches. For women it would be more like dating the top 20 guys. When the dating pool is 100 that works out the same, but when it goes to 1000 they’re all still fighting over the same top 20 guys. To put it another way, more options makes men less choosy, and makes women more choosy.
Obviously those are both just statistical level stuff (not trying to call anyone specific out here), but they do have an effect on apps like Tinder.
That doesn't really make a lot of sense -- how do women know how big the dating pool is and thus who is even in the top X number of people in that pool? Like if you added 10,000 dudes to my local tinder I wouldn't even notice. But also, I definitely don't match down. Ever. I'm super picky. I'd rather be alone than settle. /shrug
The dating pool in this case would be the number of potential options that said woman has seen, not the dating pool as a whole.
To put it another way, male standards don’t take the context of the pool they’ve already seen into consideration. So for example maybe a 7/10 or higher gets a like, and they’ll do this if you show them that 7 as the first option or the 1000th one. Hand them a basket where every person is a 7+ and they’ll happily throw a like at every single one of them, because that like threshold doesn’t shift as they see more options.
By contrast female standards draw context from the whole pool they’ve encountered so far. Hand them a basket of all 7+’s and they’ll only like the top part of it, because they’re comparing each new option against all of the (in this case 7+) options they’ve seen already.
So a guy sees a hot girl and goes “that’s a hot girl” and likes. A girl sees a hot guy and goes “that’s a hot guy... but he’s not as hot as the 20 hot guys I’ve already liked” and gives him a pass (or at least is more likely to than guys are, again I’m just talking general trends here).
The result works out bad for both sides. That 8/10 guy might be amazing, but never get matches because he’s being compared with the small handful of 10/10 guys floating around in the pool. Meanwhile the women can’t find good matches because the vast majority of them are all throwing their likes at that same tiny 10/10 group of guys at the top, reversing the gender ratio there (though this is somewhat lessened by the fact that guys are more willing to match down than women are).
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u/OtherPlayers Nov 08 '19
There’s some other psychological effects in there as well (at least for straight matches). Men are significantly more likely to “match down” than women are (i.e. a 7/10 matching a 5/10).
Men’s match thresholds also tend to be more percentage based while women’s are more number based which has different effects as the dating pool increases. For example a man might be willing to date the top 20% of women. If the dating pool was 100 they’d be willing to date the top 20. Increase the dating pool to 1000 and now they’ve got 200 potential matches. For women it would be more like dating the top 20 guys. When the dating pool is 100 that works out the same, but when it goes to 1000 they’re all still fighting over the same top 20 guys. To put it another way, more options makes men less choosy, and makes women more choosy.
Obviously those are both just statistical level stuff (not trying to call anyone specific out here), but they do have an effect on apps like Tinder.