Dating on the internet? Beware, scientists may be tracking you (Image: Los Alamos Natl Lab/U.S. Dept of Labor)
Dating on the internet? Beware, scientists may be tracking you (Image: Los Alamos Natl Lab/U.S. Dept of Labor)
The anonymity of internet dating allows people to be more adventurous and choose a date from a wider pool of people, a Swedish study suggests.
Internet daters are more likely than people who date the traditional way to bypass their immediate circle of friends.
Petter Holme from Umeå University in Sweden led the study, which was published in the latest issue of the journal Social Networks.
Holme and colleagues anonymously hopped onto the Swedish online dating site pussokram.com and looked at the social interactions between about 30,000 hopeful romantics, who were on average 21 years old.
The website, whose name roughly translates into "kiss 'n' hugs" in English, provided an arena for flirting, dating and other romantic communication, as well as communication for non-romantic friendship.
People could communicate with friends through private messages or 'flirt' by writing messages in the users' guest books, which anyone signed up to the site could access.
Over 17 months, the researchers analysed the number and type of contacts on the site and compared these virtual social interactions with those made in the real community.
They found that users formed 'clusters' or groups based on friends of friends, similar to social networks formed in real communities.
But the researchers found that unlike real communities, people using the site were less likely to flirt with someone from their own friendship group and were more likely to flirt with people who weren't their friends.
Online flirting differs
Australian psychologist Professor Pip Pattison from the University of Melbourne specialises in studying social networks.
She said the research revealed some interesting issues about the differences between real groups and those "constrained by hardware".
In real communities clusters of friends tended to know one another, Pattison said. "Any relationship between two individuals is embedded in a group of people who know both parties."
But she said there was less clustering on the site.
"The fact that each relationship is essentially conducted in a much more private way than normal social networks, and the fact that all your network partners know one another does change the attraction between two people [on the site]," she said.
Pattison said some aspects of the research could have been taken further, like the difference between various relationships.
"Friendship groups where there is a reciprocated communication were more stable than the chat group flirtations. This could have been studied more closely," she said.
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