Swiping more, committing less: Unraveling the links among dating app use, dating app success, and intention to commit infidelity

Abstract The present study was conducted to explore the cognitive processes linking people's perceptions of their mobile dating app experience and their intention to commit infidelity. Three hundred and ninety-five participants were recruited through a U.S. based university (44.6%) and MTurk (55.4%). Our results indicate that people's perceived success on a dating app was positively associated with their intention to commit infidelity through self-perceived desirability, and negatively associated with their intention to commit infidelity through perceived amount of available partners. These findings are discussed in light of theories of relational investment.

[1]  Stephanie S. Spielmann,et al.  On the Rebound: Focusing on Someone New Helps Anxiously Attached Individuals Let Go of Ex-Partners , 2009, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[2]  Freddy MacKee,et al.  Social Media in Gay London: Tinder as an Alternative to Hook-Up Apps , 2016 .

[3]  Douglas M. Hawkins,et al.  The Problem of Overfitting , 2004, J. Chem. Inf. Model..

[4]  L. Taylor,et al.  Male Partner Selectivity, Romantic Confidence, and Media Depictions of Partner Scarcity , 2013, Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior.

[5]  Janelle Ward,et al.  What are you doing on Tinder? Impression management on a matchmaking mobile app , 2017 .

[6]  Cédric Courtois,et al.  From swiping to casual sex and/or committed relationships: Exploring the experiences of Tinder users , 2018, Inf. Soc..

[7]  Narissra M. Punyanunt-Carter,et al.  Swiping right: Sociosexuality, intentions to engage in infidelity, and infidelity experiences on Tinder , 2017, Personality and Individual Differences.

[8]  Angela D. James,et al.  Marital Attitudes, Perceived Mate Availability, and Subjective Well-Being among Partnered African American Men and Women , 1996 .

[9]  J. Simpson,et al.  Individual differences in sociosexuality: evidence for convergent and discriminant validity. , 1991, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[10]  P. Regan,et al.  The Mating Game: A Primer on Love, Sex, and Marriage , 2002 .

[11]  Marco Pereira,et al.  Infidelity in Dating Relationships: Gender-Specific Correlates of Face-to-Face and Online Extradyadic Involvement , 2015, Archives of Sexual Behavior.

[12]  Carin Perilloux,et al.  Women’s physical attractiveness and short-term mating strategies , 2013 .

[13]  C. Rusbult.  Commitment and Satisfaction in Romantic Associations: A Test of the investment Model , 1980 .

[14]  Marti A. Hearst,et al.  Assessing attractiveness in online dating profiles , 2008, CHI.

[15]  Leah E. LeFebvre.  Swiping me off my feet , 2018 .

[16]  Lik Sam Chan,et al.  Who uses dating apps? Exploring the relationships among trust, sensation-seeking, smartphone use, and the intent to use dating apps based on the Integrative Model , 2017, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[17]  Jeremy P. Birnholtz,et al.  Seeing and being seen: Co-situation and impression formation using Grindr, a location-aware gay dating app , 2015, New Media Soc..

[18]  Tien Ee Dominic Yeo,et al.  Relationships form so quickly that you won't cherish them: Mobile Dating Apps and the Culture of Instantaneous Relationships , 2016, SMSociety.

[19]  Daniel A. Miller,et al.  Ignore your partners' current Facebook friends; beware the ones they add! , 2014, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[20]  Steven Arnocky,et al.  Men's sociosexuality is sensitive to changes in mate availability , 2016 .

[21]  S. M. Drigotas,et al.  An Investment Model Prediction of Dating Infidelity , 1999 .

[22]  G. Rhodes,et al.  Attractiveness and sexual behavior: Does attractiveness enhance mating success? , 2005 .

[23]  Esther Perel,et al.  The State of Affairs. Rethinking Infidelity , 2017, Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung.

[24]  Laura Thompson.  “I can be your Tinder nightmare”: Harassment and misogyny in the online sexual marketplace , 2018 .

[25]  Christopher J. Carpenter,et al.  The players of micro-dating: Individual and gender differences in goal orientations toward micro-dating apps , 2016, First Monday.

[26]  Minako K. Maykovich,et al.  Attitudes Versus Behavior in Extramarital Sexual Relations. , 1976 .

[27]  A. Little,et al.  Viewing attractive or unattractive same-sex individuals changes self-rated attractiveness and face preferences in women , 2006, Animal Behaviour.

[28]  Hamed Haddadi,et al.  A first look at user activity on tinder , 2016, 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM).

[29]  C. Lutz,et al.  Love at first swipe? Explaining Tinder self-presentation and motives , 2017 .

[30]  Caryl E. Rusbult,et al.  The Investment Model of Commitment Processes , 2011 .

[31]  Christopher D. Watkins,et al.  Cues to the sex ratio of the local population influence women’s preferences for facial symmetry , 2011, Animal Behaviour.

[32]  K. Cook,et al.  Social Exchange Theory , 1989, Theoretical Sociology.

[33]  Judith S. Donath,et al.  Online personals: an overview , 2004, CHI EA '04.

[34]  Jessica Strubel,et al.  Love me Tinder: Body image and psychosocial functioning among men and women. , 2017, Body image.

[35]  F. Fincham,et al.  Infidelity in romantic relationships. , 2017, Current opinion in psychology.

[36]  Ralph E. Johnson.  Some Correlates of Extramarital Coitus , 1970 .

[37]  Siegfried Macho,et al.  Estimating, testing, and comparing specific effects in structural equation models: the phantom model approach. , 2011, Psychological methods.

[38]  Elisabeth Timmermans,et al.  Why are you cheating on tinder? Exploring users' motives and (dark) personality traits , 2018, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[39]  Michael A Babyak,et al.  What You See May Not Be What You Get: A Brief, Nontechnical Introduction to Overfitting in Regression-Type Models , 2004, Psychosomatic medicine.

[40]  Rebecca Weston,et al.  A Brief Guide to Structural Equation Modeling , 2006 .

[41]  Catalina L. Toma,et al.  There Are Plenty of Fish in the Sea: The Effects of Choice Overload and Reversibility on Online Daters’ Satisfaction With Selected Partners , 2017 .

[42]  Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford,et al.  Mate value both positively and negatively predicts intentions to commit an infidelity , 2017 .

[43]  Anthony Cox,et al.  Components of self-perceived mate value. , 2008 .

[44]  J. Gibson.  The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception , 1979 .

[45]  Wen-Bin Chiou,et al.  More Options Lead to More Searching and Worse Choices in Finding Partners for Romantic Relationships Online: An Experimental Study , 2009, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[46]  Garth J. O. Fletcher,et al.  The New Science of Intimate Relationships , 2002 .

[47]  Al Cooper,et al.  Online infidelity: A new dimension in couple relationships with implications for evaluation and treatment , 2000 .

[48]  Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair,et al.  Individual differences in sociosexuality predict picture-based mobile dating app use , 2018, Personality and Individual Differences.

[49]  D. Buss,et al.  What predicts romantic relationship satisfaction and mate retention intensity: mate preference fulfillment or mate value discrepancies? , 2016 .

[50]  John Sabini,et al.  Subjective and Objective Measures of Attractiveness and Their Relation to Sexual Behavior and Sexual Attitudes in University Students , 2007, Archives of sexual behavior.

[51]  Michael D. Buhrmester,et al.  Amazon's Mechanical Turk , 2011, Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[52]  H. Simon,et al.  Invariants of human behavior. , 1990, Annual review of psychology.

[53]  Aurelio José Figueredo,et al.  Intentions Towards Infidelity Scale , 2010 .

[54]  P. Barrett.  Structural equation modelling : Adjudging model fit , 2007 .

[55]  Meredith Griffin,et al.  Motives and Concerns Associated with Geosocial Networking App Usage: An Exploratory Study Among Heterosexual College Students in the United States , 2018, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[56]  Nicole B. Ellison,et al.  Relationshopping: Investigating the market metaphor in online dating , 2010 .

[57]  Kenneth A. Bollen,et al.  Structural Equations with Latent Variables , 1989 .

[58]  Michael J. Rosenfeld.  Marriage, Choice, and Couplehood in the Age of the Internet , 2017 .

[59]  Tara M. Emmers-Sommer,et al.  Reasons for (Non)engagement in Infidelity , 2010 .

[60]  Andrew P. Clark,et al.  Self-perceived attractiveness and masculinization predict women's sociosexuality , 2004 .

[61]  Gábor Orosz,et al.  Too many swipes for today: The development of the Problematic Tinder Use Scale (PTUS) , 2016, Journal of behavioral addictions.

[62]  Elisabeth Timmermans,et al.  Development and validation of the Tinder Motives Scale (TMS) , 2017, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[63]  J. Traupmann,et al.  Equity and extramarital sexuality , 1978, Archives of sexual behavior.

[64]  Stephen Owen,et al.  Liquid love? Dating apps, sex, relationships and the digital transformation of intimacy , 2017 .

[65]  Rory McGloin,et al.  Too hot to trust: Examining the relationship between attractiveness, trustworthiness, and desire to date in online dating , 2018, New Media Soc..

[66]  Gilla K Shapiro,et al.  Correlates of Tinder Use and Risky Sexual Behaviors in Young Adults , 2017, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[67]  Daniel A. Miller,et al.  Facebook or Memory: Which Is the Real Threat to Your Relationship? , 2015, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[68]  Helen E. Fisher,et al.  Prevalence of Experiences With Consensual Nonmonogamous Relationships: Findings From Two National Samples of Single Americans , 2017, Journal of sex & marital therapy.

[69]  Sukeshini A. Grandhi,et al.  Impression Management Struggles in Online Dating , 2014, GROUP.

[70]  Jesse Chandler,et al.  Using Mechanical Turk to Study Clinical Populations , 2013 .

[71]  Manpal Singh Bhogal,et al.  Do the dark triad and self-perceived mate value predict intention to mate poach? , 2016 .

[72]  Monica T. Whitty,et al.  The Realness of Cybercheating , 2005 .

[73]  Steven Arnocky,et al.  Perceived mate availability influences intrasexual competition, jealousy and mate-guarding behavior , 2014 .