In another attempt to collect objective data on deception, economists Guenter Hitsch and Ali Hortaçsu of the University of Chicago and psychologist Dan Ariely of M.I.T. compared the heights and weights of online daters with the same statistics obtained from national census data. Like Hancock and Ellison, they found that online height is exaggerated by only an inch or so for both men and women but that women appear to understate their weight more and more as they get older: by five pounds when they are in their 20s, 17 pounds in their 30s and 19 pounds in their 40s.
Online dating
Because self-reported data can be unreliable,
especially those from people asked to confess bad
things about themselves, several researchers have
sought objective ways to quantify online deception.
For example, psychologist Jeffrey Hancock
of Cornell University and communications professor
Nicole Ellison of Michigan State University
bring people into a lab, where they measure
height and weight and then check the numbers
against those in their online profiles. The preliminary
data suggest that, on average, online
profiles shave off about five pounds and add perhaps
an inch in height. According to Ellison, although
deception is “fairly common, the lies are
of a very small magnitude.” On the other hand,
she says that the shorter and heavier people are,
the bigger the lies.
In another attempt to collect objective data on deception, economists Guenter Hitsch and Ali Hortaçsu of the University of Chicago and psychologist Dan Ariely of M.I.T. compared the heights and weights of online daters with the same statistics obtained from national census data. Like Hancock and Ellison, they found that online height is exaggerated by only an inch or so for both men and women but that women appear to understate their weight more and more as they get older: by five pounds when they are in their 20s, 17 pounds in their 30s and 19 pounds in their 40s.
In another attempt to collect objective data on deception, economists Guenter Hitsch and Ali Hortaçsu of the University of Chicago and psychologist Dan Ariely of M.I.T. compared the heights and weights of online daters with the same statistics obtained from national census data. Like Hancock and Ellison, they found that online height is exaggerated by only an inch or so for both men and women but that women appear to understate their weight more and more as they get older: by five pounds when they are in their 20s, 17 pounds in their 30s and 19 pounds in their 40s.
