Article summary of Separating fact from fiction: an examination of deceptive self-presentation in online dating profiles by Toma et. al. - Chapter

What is this article about?

People want to present themselves in a good way when they’re looking for love. They want to present themselves as desirable mates and sometimes even use deception to reach this. Men and women both report lying to an attractive person of the opposite sex. Online dating is getting more popular these days and more and more people are finding long-lasting relationships with the help of online dating. Despite the positive stories, online dating is usually associated with deception. Information could be misrepresented and pictures can be manipulated. A survey reported that 86% of the online daters think that others misrepresent their physical characteristics. In the current study, the researchers look at information on dating profiles and observed characteristics of these people to determine the degree of truth about the information in online dating profiles. The truth together with the participants’ views of their own accuracy are used to determine the amount of deception in online dating.

If you want to get romantically involved with somebody you have to decide which information you convey to this person and how to present this information in a way to make a good impression. This is called self-presentation. Self-presentation is a motive  for engaging in deception. This usually happens in the dating context, because these daters can only be successful if they appear desirable. Online dating profiles can bring about dilemmas for people. People want to present themselves as desirable and may enhance their pictures or exaggerate certain aspects of their lives, but they eventually also just want somebody who understands them and loves them for who they truly are. Sometimes they really don’t know what to put on the dating profile: the truth or a much nicer truth? Research shows that people desire partners that view them the same as they do. Usually people use deception in the beginning stages of a relationship (such as when chatting online), because otherwise people might not be willing to take a chance with them. If people then find somebody who is interested in them and they go out on a couple of dates, they are more willing to show their true colors.

The hyperpersonal model addresses the nature of relational development in the online context. This model suggests that computer-mediated communication enables selective self-presentation. People can plan, create and edit their self-presentation. Online daters don’t have to worry about their body language and they don’t have to worry that they will not say the right thing at the right time. So, it looks like computer-mediated communication prevents undesirable nonverbal cues from being expressed. This is important for deception, because nonverbal behavior is the least controllable and the most likely to convey deception. However, there are also aspects of computer-mediated communication that may discourage deception. One of those things is that profiles may be saved. Some people don’t like that, because then their lie is visible on the whole internet.

Another thing that may reduce deception in online communication is that people might be afraid to lie because they are afraid that during a date, their partners will know that they have lied. The connection between the self and self-presentation may also constrain deception in online dating. People might be afraid that others who know them will see the online profile and see that they have enhanced their picture.

Men and women use different strategies to enhance themselves. According to evolutionary psychology, men search for women who signal youth and physical attractiveness and women search for someone of social status. Men are more likely to lie about their career and education and women are more likely to lie about their youth and attractiveness.

What experiment is used?

In the study, online daters were asked to come to the lab and they had to tell how accurate their profile information is and how accurate they think that online profiles in general are. Their dating profile was checked before they came to the lab and participants didn’t know this happened. Their height, weight and their age was checked. The researchers expected men to lie more about their occupation and education and also to lie more about their height than women, because height in men is usually associated with higher status. They expected women to lie more about their age and weight. Participants also got a questionnaire about deception in online dating. They were asked about how acceptable they thought it was to lie about certain characteristics in online dating. For example, they were asked about lying about height, weight and age. They also had to indicate how many people in their social circle knew about their dating profile.

It is difficult to discover the truth when you ask people to tell the truth about their own lies. Many participants (80%) indicated that their profile page had things that didn’t match the truth. It was found that men overestimated their height and women underestimated their weight. These were not just mere mistakes of participants, they intentionally put this on their profile to look better. The magnitude of the deception was small. People didn’t exaggerate the lie about their height or weight. Most of the lies were subtle, but some lies were very extreme. People who lied about one characteristic weren’t more likely to lie about other characteristic. Participants were most truthful about their relationship status (single, divorced) and least accurate about their photograph. Almost everybody can enhance photographs.

Another thing that was found was that the number of people from the social circle that knew about the online profile correlated with a more accurate presentation of the self on the online profile.

There were also gender differences. As suggested above, men lied more about their height and women more about their weight. The more participants differ from physical norms, the more they tended to lie. There were, however, not many lies about age. There were no differences found between the amount of lying between men and women. However, in the self-reported data, there was a difference. Men reported being more tolerant of deception than women, especially when it comes to lies about relationship status and social status. Women were not tolerant of lies about physical attractiveness. This finding is consistent with the view of evolutionary psychologists according to which men are more likely than women to pass their genes on to the next generation by having multiple sexual mates.

Researchers in self-presentation can’t come to a single conclusion when it comes to a theory of deception. The only thing that they agree about is why people don’t use deception when they could use it. According to studies, people experience anxiety when they have to create and maintain a false image. They are also afraid to be caught lying, because of social sanctions. That’s the reason why the participants of this study used online deception only scarcely. Some neuropsychologists think that people are constrained from deception by their internal reward mechanism. This mechanism even works when there is little chance of getting caught when telling a lie. The internal reward mechanism tries to avoid a self-concept shift. So, we do not want to see ourselves as liars and cheaters, but as virtuous people.

One of the limitations of this study is that there were no rich participants. Participants received a small amount of money for one hour of their time and for wealthy people this was not a reason to participate. Also, people who engage in extreme forms of deception were maybe less willing to participate.