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Who are you when you’re online dating? Are you your real self, stripped of the pretenses you put on when you’re out in the world? Do you take those pretenses with you when you log on? Or do you perhaps construct new ones, unique to the medium? And what does the self you bring to a dating site say not just about you, but about the site itself?

The philosopher Evan Selinger gets at some of these questions in his recent Los Angeles Review of Books review of “ Dataclysm,” an exploration by Christian Rudder, an OkCupid co-founder, of his site’s trove of numbers. The book’s subtitle is “Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking),” and Mr. Selinger takes issue with the idea that the data Mr. Rudder marshals can reveal our true selves. Mr. Rudder, he writes, “takes it for granted that, in general, people are genuine when they think nobody is watching, which means, in this particular case, that OkCupid’s data is a transparent window into an authentic reality.” He adds:

“Renowned sociologist Erving Goffman convincingly demonstrated that social interactions can be performative. In other words, we often modify what we do to account for other people’s expectations and judgments. But Rudder just assumes that all of the reasons we have for impression management fade away on OkCupid. An equally plausible alternative possibility is that when OkCupid users interact with the platform and express themselves through the constraints it imposes, they don masks appropriate for the occasion.”

In “Dataclysm,” Mr. Rudder does use data to draw some conclusions about what people want. On the effect of a woman’s age on men’s ratings of her, he writes, “A woman’s at her best when she’s in her very early twenties. Period.” However, he notes, when asked what they’re looking for, men tend to list higher ages: “Since I don’t think that anyone is intentionally misleading us when they give OkCupid their preferences — there’s little incentive to do that, since all you get then is a site that gives you what you know you don’t want — I see this as a statement of what men imagine they’re supposed to desire versus what they actually do.”

Whether what men (or women) do on OkCupid reflects what they “actually” desire is part of Dr. Selinger’s question. He told Op-Talk in an email that even “when nobody’s watching,” we may behave in socially determined ways: “By virtue of growing up in societies with distinctive norms, it’s easy to internalize social expectations. It’s naïve to believe that when we think nobody is watching, all of the social baggage and prejudice simply and immediately evaporates.”

And, he added in an interview, online dating sites can have their own effects on us: “Platforms are not neutral. They’re not mere conduits for us to enter input and receive output.” Rather, “the ways that information is presented, the framing, the wording, the options that are available, the ease or difficulty of accessing certain options,” he argued, “can definitely impact how we choose to behave.”

In an email to Op-Talk, Mr. Rudder said his book doesn’t in fact claim that OkCupid behavior is authentic behavior: “In many cases I explicitly investigate the distance between a person’s online and offline self. When I look at profile text, for example, I examine it as an artifact of self-representation, as a version of a self a person has chosen to put forward online.

“In the book, I look at people searching for racist jokes on Google, people insulting each other on Twitter, people flirting on OkCupid,” he added. “Are these actions ‘performative’? Of course — and I investigate that. But are they meaningless? To claim so not only reveals a basic misunderstanding of how people use websites today but it would also come as a hearty surprise to the thousands of scholars using online data to generate peer-reviewed human behavior research.”

If online platforms affect the way we present ourselves, then might online dating data be a source of information about those effects? That is, can online dating teach us not about dating, but about being online?

“The questions that are easiest to answer via online dating involve how people behave on computers,” Eli J. Finkel, a psychologist who has studied online dating, told Op-Talk. OkCupid data don’t just show how we are when no one’s looking, he argued, but rather how we are “when no one’s looking and, by the way, you’re looking at a tablet or a laptop or a smartphone.” Our behavior in such cases may or may not tell us anything about face-to-face situations, he argued, but it’s worth understanding for its own sake: Online dating data could help researchers answer questions about people’s reactions to certain photographs or messages (questions Mr. Rudder does address in his book).

The difficulties of online life bring up some larger questions, too. Dr. Selinger notes that the prevalence of trolling in online comments sections has incited intense debate: “What was it about nature of online comments that might nudge or encourage or lead to certain types of results being frequent?” How can online spaces encourage civility?

And the design of social media platforms has led to its own areas of inquiry: “Ever since we’ve had critical discussions of platforms like Facebook, we’ve been very sensitive to, How do things like only providing a thumbs-up button get people to interact?” And, “Now that we’re looking at algorithmic filtering as it’s occurring in certain black-box ways, we’re raising questions about how the presentation of information will cultivate certain responses.”

Could online dating data help us understand our behavior on social media? Could it help us make comments sections nicer, or even give us insights we could use to curb online harassment? For Dr. Finkel, that may depend on “the extent to which romantic context alters people’s behavior” — that is, if the way people act when they’re trying to date has any relationship to the way they act when they’re, say, arguing with one another in the comments.

And any study of people’s online data raises the issue of privacy. In his review, Dr. Selinger criticizes Mr. Rudder’s willingness to mine his users’ data for revelations about human behavior: “When most people log on to OkCupid, they expect their information to be analyzed for purposes related to finding good matches. They certainly aren’t thinking about the possibility that a data scientist will convert their behavior into sociological facts about basic human dispositions and relations.”

And, he told Op-Talk, requirements of academic sociology, like getting the approval of an institutional review board, serve a purpose: “People on institutional review boards are supposed to be deeply knowledgeable about the ethics of research with human subjects, and they’re supposed to provide a check against some of the problems that can happen when researchers want to get good research done” but may not be “sufficiently sensitive to how going about it they way that they want might in fact hurt people.”

Mr. Rudder, for his part, believes users are aware of OkCupid’s interest in large-scale data analysis. “Certainly on OkCupid we’ve been publishing this kind of research for almost as long as anyone has been really using the site,” he told Op-Talk in an interview. “We’ve never made a secret about it. Our tagline is, ‘We use math to get you dates.’ We believe our users are smart enough to realize that we’re working with data to try to order the world for them.”

The way that platforms influence people has already become a part of the public conversation around online dating — Mr. Selinger notes that critics of Tinder often point out how “the very way in which the information gets presented will facilitate” particular behaviors, because it allows “a sort of quick look through the roster, like frictionless shopping.” Whether the kind of data Mr. Rudder examines will be used to study how his own platform operates — and how that data will be collected — remains to be seen.