Do our ideals slip by the wayside when we meet someone in person?

Spending quite so much time as I do online the whole web culture is one that fascinates me.  This is especially so when trying to cultivate online communities where you try and foster a closeness and togetherness from people that have often never met face to face.

So there's some interesting research out this month that may shed some light on how our desires are somewhat higher when conversing online than they are when we meet someone in person.

The research looks at the world of online dating and in particular at how our desires differ when we meet our online mates in the real world.

“People have ideas about the abstract qualities they’re looking for in a romantic partner,” says Paul Eastwick, assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M and lead author of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “But once you actually meet somebody face to face, those ideal preferences for traits tend to be quite flexible.”

 

“Thinking about this or that feature of a person apart from taking the whole person into account doesn’t predict actual attraction,” says co-author Alice Eagly, professor of social psychology at Northwestern.
 
So the research essentially shows that our online perceptions of someone are often quite two dimensional and lack the context that meeting someone face to face provides.
 
A number of the communities that I've both managed and participated in have had an active 'social scene', with members meeting up at either official gatherings or impromptu get togethers.  Doing so undoubtably gives members a richer understanding of each other and helps to make the community a much healthier one as a result.

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2 thoughts on “Do our ideals slip by the wayside when we meet someone in person?

    • Funny you mention that David. There's a thing called 'change deafness' that I wrote about a few weeks ago.
      http://adigaskell.org/2011/11/12/change-

      Basically means that language use evolved when only face to face conversations were possible, so we're not very good at detecting change when we're denied the use of our other senses.

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