Project

CheckMate

Dating practices have been indelibly marked by the pace and communication opportunities available online. We are examining this phenomenon to see what it suggests about decision-making, attraction, and human attachment. To do so, we are using a few converging approaches: data analysis of online behavior, data visualizations, and direct experiments. Unlike other decision-making domains, online behaviors each result in a trace: button clicks, pages visited. Even from anonymous histories, we can begin to reconstruct the decision-making processes and variables that inform such decisions. Our laboratory experiments complement our descriptive data analysis through direct examination of the trends and patterns we see occurring. Through these approaches, we hope to understand predictors of successful relationships and to develop methods to improve the process.