Swipes left, swipes left, takes a pause, stares at the screen, swipes right. According to a survey more than 50 million users swipe right and left on Tinder in search of their perfect date. The user navigates through the dating pool using either a left swipe to reject or a right swipe to accept a prospective match. This dating app uses GPS location to find nearby users, and provides you with a supply of never-ending pictures and a brief “bio” of potential partners. If you and another user are interested in each other, you both swipe right. This creates a match between the two of you, where you can initiate conversations and connect with each other using the messaging platform of the app.
What seems like an easy manoeuvre is valued between $750 million to $1 billion. Tinder reportedly processes 1.4 billion swipes and generates 26 million matches a day across 196 countries. Tinder claimed that by the end of 2014, an average user logged in eleven times per day and spent approximately seven minutes on each session, making an average session on each day longer than 1.25 hours.
What is it about this app that makes it irresistible, and why do we find ourselves swiping from morning to evening?
The popularity of Tinder represents a shift in dating culture, one that focuses on immediate gratification, instant attraction, and convenience. The Uses and Gratifications Theory helps us assess the popularity of Tinder, by suggesting that media users play an active role in choosing and using media that fulfills their needs. According to a 2015 study, checking matches and messages were seen as aspects of self-esteem enhancement for there was an immediate positive social feedback. The app helps meet our physical, social, and psychosocial needs such as the feeling of being validated as physically attractive and as a result receiving a right swipe.
Tinder also encourages users to engage in personal storytelling, by allowing them to share personal accounts from their daily life. For instance, they can share the music they like from Spotify and their pictures from their Instagram account. Hence, investing more time on this app increases your probability of receiving a right swipe, ultimately leading to a higher generation of matches. This makes swiping a fun activity to engage in.
The app operates with the assumption that attraction plays a significant role in mate selection. By allowing users to include six of their photographs and a brief bio, Tinder becomes a convenient, easy-to-use platform as the users get a snapshot about the other person, but also have the opportunity to find out more. A study led by Vasily Klucharev from the F.C. Donders Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging in the Netherlands found that activity in the nucleus accumbens, a brain region involved in reward processing, is more active when people see attractive faces. By viewing such faces on Tinder, your brain rewards you and thereby, reinforces you to continue the process in pursuit of more rewards.
Evolutionary psychology plays a role in answering why humans engage in romantic relationships. For many, being part of a happy, long-term romantic relationship is essential. Factors such as survival, reproduction and care for offspring are also part of the motivation to seek long term relationships.
As Arathy Puthillam, a researcher from Monk Prayogshala, writes, “Historically, women have been pressured by the quantity and quality of external resources and genes they can accrue from their sexual partners to ensure the survival of their offspring.” People look for good quality genes and physical attributes such as facial symmetry, height, and a deeper voice in men. To showcase the ability of rearing, women preferred men who displayed traits like benevolence and kindness. On Tinder, the users may seek others with traits such as these, foster long-term relationships, make friends, or engage in casual hookups.
Tinder also has the element of unpredictability, which is very rewarding for our brains. It is this serendipity that makes people gamble to win the jackpot, i.e., swipe profiles of strangers and choose a partner and not know when a match is created. If you were swiping for a while, and left the app, chances are that a match was created even when you weren’t using the app.
One of the potential issues with Tinder is the choice fatigue that occurs due to the choice overload. Given that there might be several matches made, users may find it hard to decide on one particular match. This choice fatigue may lead to the user picking no one from the matches.
Further, complications occur due to the presence of superficiality, as users rely merely on physical appearances to make their decision.
Given the novel nature of Tinder, along with the procedures in place to ensure personal safety, the app becomes an arena to search for relationships - be it long-term or short-term. Tinder is definitely a modern romance tool suited for a generation growing on technology and for those who wish to experience the digital dating world.
Parvathi Sajiv
