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In Defense of Tinder
The New York Times: IS the smartphone revolution sullying the online dating world? The old paradigm for online dating was a website like eHarmony or Match.com. Courtesy of an elaborate algorithm, you studied detailed profiles of potential dates, initiated contact through an anonymized email system and, if you got a response, began a conversation that might lead to a date. Perhaps with your future spouse. The new paradigm is a mobile app like Tinder. You quickly browse photos on your phone, swiping to the right if the photo appeals, to the left if it doesn’t. If the attraction is mutual — that is, if both of you have swiped right — you might try to set up a date for, say, five minutes later.
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We Know Why You’re Always Late
The Wall Street Journal: Chronically late people can be frustrating and baffling to anyone stuck waiting for them. One main explanation for their behavior is deceptively simple, psychologists say: People simply underestimate how long a task will take. That’s a little-known concept called the planning fallacy, which is a strong tendency to chronically underestimate task completion. The planning fallacy is one of the most difficult behavioral patterns to change, experts say. “This is a judgment that you’d think that people would be motivated to get right,” said Justin Kruger, a social psychologist and professor in the marketing department at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
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The Logic of Long Lines
The Atlantic: Earlier this week, Chipotle had a one-day buy-one-get-one-free special to promote their new-ish (and hugely unpopular) tofu tacos. Critics have been taking down the "free"-ness of this promotion in two ways: One, claiming the free burrito requires saving the receipt and—much like a coupon—many will inevitably get lost in bags, eaten by dogs, or thrown away accidentally. Secondly, critics say, the crowds during free-food promotions will make waiting in line not worth it simply due to opportunity cost. ... But long lines aren't always unproductive: Some waits increase the appeal of a product.
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On Tinder, Taking a Swipe at Love, or Sex, or Something, in New York
The New York Times: On a recent night, with Valentine’s Day looming, I went out for drinks with a woman I know and a few of her friends. It was a Thursday, and the bar they chose, Bondurants, on the Upper East Side, was packed with people just like them: good-looking, semi-affluent millennials, downing craft beer and milling about in hungry-looking, monosexual clusters. My acquaintance, Dana, who is 25 and works in public relations, is an enthusiastic, some might say obsessive, user of the dating app Tinder. She, like her friends, will often spend hours blithely swiping through its gallery of digitized faces — at work, at home, even in busy pickup bars.
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How Real Are Facebook Friendships?
The Atlantic: Editor of the New York Times Book Review Pamela Paul’s recent column “How to Be Liked By Everyone Online” describes how social media “has upended social and psychological norms” by changing some words to their opposite, or at least giving them a very different gist than they initially had. With Facebook, "to friend" has become a verb, and yet to do so, in the social-media sense, is a fairly passive act, Paul said. In real life, when a friendship ruptures, it’s a major event. But just as it’s easy to start a Facebook relationship, it’s virtually effort-free to end one. The personal investment on either side of “unfriending” somebody is infinitely lower than offline.
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We Know How You Feel
The New Yorker: Three years ago, archivists at A.T. & T. stumbled upon a rare fragment of computer history: a short film that Jim Henson produced for Ma Bell, in 1963. Henson had been hired to make the film for a conference that the company was convening to showcase its strengths in machine-to-machine communication. Told to devise a faux robot that believed it functioned better than a person, he came up with a cocky, boxy, jittery, bleeping Muppet on wheels. “This is computer H14,” it proclaims as the film begins.
