It all starts with a swipe

PEOPLE often marry people who are just like them – similar in terms of social background, world view and race. Online dating may be changing that, however, breaking us out of our existing social circles. Economists Josué Ortega at the University of Essex, UK, and Philipp Hergovich at the University of Vienna, Austria, suggest it could even lead to more integrated societies.

Before the first dating websites appeared in the 1990s, most people would meet dates through existing networks of friends or colleagues. But the rise of dating sites like Match.com and apps like Tinder has made online dating the norm for many. It is the second most common way for heterosexual partners to meet and the most common for homosexual partners. More than a third of marriages now involve people who met online.

Ortega and Hergovich claim that if just a small number of online matches are between people of different races, then social integration should occur rapidly. “A few connections can really change the panorama of diversity,” says Ortega.

They tested their hypothesis with a simulated social network of male and female “agents” who were looking for a partner of the opposite sex. Initially, each agent was highly connected with agents of their own race, and only poorly so with agents from other races – mimicking real-world relationships in societies with a large degree of segregation.


But when they started dropping in the random connections that strangers make on a dating site, their model predicted an increase in the number of interracial marriages.

Is that what has happened in the real world? The number of interracial marriages in the US has certainly gone up in the last few decades. The researchers also note that the rate of such marriages rose around the time that online dating became popular in the mid-90s. It jumped again in 2014 – soon after the advent of Tinder.

Establishing causation is hard, though, because there are many other factors in play. For example, a growing number of US states have started offering African Americans scholarships to university, where they may have met students of other races. “But even accounting for those changes, it does not explain what we see,” says Ortega.

US black communities have stayed relatively stable in numbers and location. And yet, in the last two decades the likelihood of black people being in interracial marriages in the US has tripled, says Ortega. “Online dating is a great way to get out of our circles – not only race but also ideologies.”

Not everyone is convinced that we can thank online dating for these effects. Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford University in California says research has shown that same-race couples were just as likely to meet online as interracial couples. “Most people who do online dating have a strong preference for same-race partners,” he says. “Meeting online does not appear to increase interracial union.”

And yet, obviously, something has.

Journal reference: arxiv.org/abs/1709.10478

This article appeared in print under the headline “Can Tinder bring social cohesion?”