This Study Reveals How Men & Women Behave On Tinder

A new study into Tinder looks at how both male and female users behave on the dating app, and how many swipes turn into matches.

The research, led by Gareth Tyson from Queen Mary University in London, reveals how male and female users go about finding matches on Tinder and what they look for when swiping through profiles.

The study, called “A First Look at User Activity on Tinder” used 14 different Tinder accounts, which were created in an attempt to mimic real accounts on the site.

Three of the profiles used stock pictures of men, and two used pictures of male volunteers who agreed to have their images used for the study.

In addition to this, researchers also created a profile with no photograph and another that stated the account had been deactivated, which were “used as a benchmark against which the picture-enabled profiles can be compared.”

All these profiles were added in London, “to remove the bias introduced by different cities”, and all the profiles were of white people, to “avoid the complexities introduced by racial homophily.”

Female profiles were also created using similar methods.

From here, the team created an algorithm that could track the basic information of the people these profiles matched with, in order to discover “which of our profiles gain the most likes from other users.”

What did the researchers find?

From their algorithm, the researchers were able to get data on how 230,000 men and 250,000 women used Tinder, by looking at their behaviour when trying to match with someone, and after a mutual like had taken place.

Overall, the study found that men tended to like a large number of users, but only received a 0.6% match rate.

On the other hand, women tended to like less, but had a 10% match rate.

Interestingly, when looking at different match rates between genders, the team found that male users tended to receive more likes from other men.

Tyson explained: “Even though the male:female ratio in our dataset is roughly even, on average, 86% of all the matches our male profiles receive come from other men.

“Homosexual men are far more active in liking than heterosexual women.”

And when it came to messaging, 21% of women were happy to initiate conversation, using an average of 122 characters in their opening messages.

However, only 7% of males wanted to begin the chatting, and if they did, they only used 12 characters.

Tyson and his team also looked at the importance of images and bios on Tinder, finding that: “With a single [male] profile picture, after four hours, only 44 matches were made, whereas this increased to 238 with three pictures.

“And without bios, our male stock profiles received an average of 16 matches from women; this increases fourfold to 69 with a bio.”

In its conclusion, the team had some interesting insights into how men behave on the app, saying: “It seems that, rather than pre-filtering their mates via the like feature, many male users like in a relatively non-selective way and post-filter after a match has been obtained. This gaming of the system undermines its operation and likely leads to much frustration.”

To see the full report, please click here.