Ah, Tinder, what a place! Where else can you find so many hilarious dating profiles? However, the app can be used for more than just hooking up. This guy, for example, made a comprehensive social experiment using it, and it’s more serious than your thesis. And what was the important question he sought an answer to? Did women within 50 miles of his surrounding area prefer him with or without a beard? You know, the important stuff.

METHODOLOGY

“For this funny experiment to work, I needed to reduce any bias unrelated to the beard. So to start, I took five pictures of myself with my facial hair in different settings with different outfits. For the purposes of anonymity (and my own amusement), I have blurred out my face and eyes in the below pictures:”

“I almost always prefer the beard, though I am currently sticking with small amounts of stubble for the time being,” the man who wanted to remain anonymous told Bored Panda. “I have used online dating in the past, but usually with little to no success and usually for only small periods. I find it difficult to transition from a Tinder match to an actually fulfilling meeting.”

“Generally, I dislike online dating,” he added. “Tinder dating and such show men a large number of women with the implication that any of them could be interested in the man, and it fosters a weird level of expectation that emphasizes quick intimacy over meaningful connections.”

“I was surprised at how many people focused on the number of successes I had. I took pictures designed to put me in the best light and make me seem interesting, and I chose a profile description that was generic but personal to maximize the pool of potential swipes.”

“Additionally, indiscriminately swiping 100 times twice a day can do a lot to increase the number of matches you get. But trying to maximize swipes wasn’t the purpose of the study. There are probably better ways to study that.”

“The above photographs represent the different types of images that I felt could increase my odds of a match (and therefore increase my data pool). They include a casual business image, an image with an animal, a moving image, and a social image. My friend, depicted in the social image, helped with the image capture and photo selection.”

“Once we finished creating the first set of images, I proceeded to shave my beard completely. We then captured the second set of images with the same outfits and same positions, but without the beard:”

“The above images represent our best attempt to recreate the initial images without the beard. This process was way more complicated than we originally envisioned, and some of the non-beard images have slight variations from the beard images. Overall, the similarities were great enough that we felt the study could proceed.

The next step was to create two semi-identical dating profiles. I chose Tinder for running this experiment due to its relatively quick swipe rate and relatively high population. The profiles were relatively barebone, including a short description, age, and occupation.

To run both accounts simultaneously, I installed an application called Parallel Space, which creates a separate environment for duplicating applications. The free version of Tinder limits each profile to 100 swipes every twelve hours – a perfect way to control my sample sizes.

For five days (Sunday night – Friday night), every 12 hours, I would open one profile, swipe right 100 times consecutively, then open the other profile and do it again. Each evening, I would add each match to an excel spreadsheet with additional available data.”

RESULTS

“First, let’s start with the overall results. What do the dating women of Tinder statistically prefer to see on my face: Beard or No Beard?”

“The vast majority of the matches I received (64 out of 94) were on the bearded profile. These results do not shock me in the least. I have never been able to pull off a clean-shaven look, and I have a glorious red beard that is a shame to lose. Where things get fun is in the breakdowns:”

“The age distribution interests me because it appears to follow a normal distribution centered around 28 (with a single spike around 32 or 33). Given that I am 31, it tells me that women on Tinder tend to be, on average, younger, or that the distribution of women interested in me tends to be younger. Either way, the distributions between the two are roughly the same and therefore provide little data on preferences by age.”

“I had not originally planned to create a date chart, but I kept the data as a means of tracking inputs. When I started feeling a drop-off in overall matches, I checked back on my dates to discover that a large portion of the matches came soon after I created the account (since I created the account Sunday night, Monday was my first day of matching).

The early spike leads me to believe that higher visibility is given to recently created accounts, but only for a very short period of time. This is likely to increase interest in new users. I have also been told that making changes to an account will increase the match rate, but I have yet to test this theory.”