By: Madison Treece

Who hasn’t told a little white lie at the start of a relationship to make themself look better? We all have been there—talking to our prospective significant other, messaging and texting for like a month, trying to get to that first in-person meeting. Most likely during that period, you led them to believe something that wasn’t completely true in the interest of making it to that first date.

And what’s the harm when it increases the likelihood of the relationship continuing? You figure that you guys can laugh about it later when you’ve been officially dating for a while.

Why do people lie on dating apps?

David Markowitz of the University of Oregon and Jeffery Hancock of Stanford University performed two studies to investigate the frequency of deception in mobile dating conversations and why deception is typically used.

They looked at how often deception was used in messages sent between the point at which daters matched on profiles until they decided to meet in person.

For the first study, 110 participants provided their mobile dating and text conversations with a partner to see if lying rates were different across different dating apps and so researchers could compare mobile dating deception rates in the same apps.

After not finding any differences in deception rates between mobile dating apps, a second study was conducted where 110 participants were asked to submit only their first 10 messages and last 10 messages from the mobile dating apps, rate the deceptiveness of the messages and explain why, if they used deception, they did so.

While most people were found to be generally honest, some people used deception to achieve the advantages described by the deception theory, which states that lies are commonly told to better self-presentation and availability management goals.

The first study found that nearly two-thirds of lies were driven by impression management, particularly self-presentation and availability management goals, and the second study found that approximately 7% of messages were deceptive.

Also, the studies found that those who told at least one lie were more deceptive in the beginning messages. Across studies, the participants’ lying rates were correlated with the perceived lying rate of their prospective partners.

The Impact of Deception

Now that we’ve learned why people choose to use deception, let’s look at how it impacts their relationship.

Liesel Sharabi of the University of West Virginia and John Caughlin of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conducted a study in which they observed how people’s view of their own deception and their prospective partners’ deception would impact their first face-to-face date.

Sharabi and Caughlin had 94 participants complete online surveys about people they had chatted with on an online dating site but hadn’t yet met. The participants also uploaded all the emails they had sent to partners through the dating site.

The participants were then given eight weeks to meet their messaging partner face-to-face and complete another online survey within 48 hours of meeting the person.

Sharabi and Caughlin found strong evidence that negative outcomes of a first in-person date could be predicted by the person believing that the other person was deceiving them in their online messages, proving that using deception in online dating plays an important role in the future development of the prospective relationship.

This shows that our little white lies actually lead to shorter relationships. As participants’ perceptions of their partner’s deception predict a negative first date outcome, it is unlikely that a second date will happen if both partners used deception in their online communications.

Deceiving your potential partner to get a first date may seem like a good idea at the time, but is it really worth it when it means no second date?

Cover image via Merchant Stronghold on Pinterest