Overview
Ever struggle with what to put in your online profiles? Many people wonder if certain traits or hobbies make them more likable, or even more desirable by potential romantic partners. For example, perhaps volunteering your time to help others signals that you’re willing to put others before yourself, or that you’re a “good person” in general, and makes potential romantic partners more interested in you.
It’s an interesting hypothesis. So we put it to the test.
Experiment
We designed an experiment with for 400 people on Amazon Mechanical Turk in which participants were shown a very brief, hypothetical dating profile (below). We chose the name “Taylor” since it’s a unisex and can indicate a man or a women. We randomized whether each participant saw “volunteering” in the activities section of our hypothetical love-seeker.
Participants read the following instructions and text, with "Volunteering" randomly included or excluded.
Imagine you’re using an online dating app and you see the dating profile below:
Name: Taylor
Age: 28
Activities: [Volunteering], art, movies, music
Name: Taylor
Age: 28
Activities: [Volunteering], art, movies, music
Participants were then asked, "How much would you want to go on a date with this person?" and responded by answering on a 1-7 scale (1 = Not at all, 7 = Very much).
Results
Unfortunately for the volunteers out there, we found no practical difference in desire to date for volunteers (avg. = 4.66) relative to non-volunteers (avg = 4.69), (p = 0.824). We did notice that men and younger participants expressed a higher desire to date than women and younger participants, but this did not interact in any way with our main volunteering manipulation.
Conclusion
If you're hoping that your volunteer efforts will give you an advantage on the dating market, you might be disappointed. We find no such effect here.
However, a caveat to this study is that we didn’t test whether the effect differs for those who also volunteer. Prior research suggests we like others more similar to ourselves. So if you enjoy volunteering and are trying to land a date with someone who also does, the jury is still out on that one.
Methods Note
To test for significant differences in likability between our experimental conditions, we used an independent samples t-test. For statistically significant results, the difference between the averages of the two groups would be large, and the corresponding “p-value” would be small (p < 0.05). This indicates that if we were to replicate the study with the same population, we would likely obtain a similar effect. Additionally, we utilized OLS regression analyses with interaction terms to explore potential significant interactions between the main results and participant demographics, such as age and gender.
Data and survey materials used for this experiment are available upon request.