Unlike many other Web dating services, eHarmony doesn’t let customers search for partners on their own. They pay up to $60 per month to be offered matches based on their answers to a long questionnaire, which currently has about 200 items. The company has gathered answers from 44 million people, and says that its matches have led to more than half a million marriages since 2005.Dr. Gonzaga, a social psychologist who previously worked at a marriage-research lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, said eHarmony wouldn’t let him disclose its formulas, but he did offer some revelations. He said its newest algorithm matches couples by focusing on six factors:
¶ Level of agreeableness — or, put another way, how quarrelsome a person is.
¶ Preference for closeness with a partner — how much emotional intimacy each wants and how much time each likes to spend with a partner.
¶ Degree of sexual and romantic passion.
¶ Level of extroversion and openness to new experience.
¶ How important spirituality is.
¶ How optimistic and happy each one is.
The more similarly that two people score in these factors, the better their chances, Dr. Gonzaga said, and presented evidence, not yet published, from several studies at eHarmony Labs. One study, which tracked more than 400 married couples matched by eHarmony, found that scores from their initial questionnaires correlated with a couple’s satisfaction with their relationship four years later.
“It is possible,” Dr. Gonzaga concluded, “to empirically derive a matchmaking algorithm that predicts the relationship of a couple before they ever meet.”
Not so fast, replied the critics in the hall. They didn’t doubt that factors like agreeableness could predict a good marriage. But that didn’t mean eHarmony had found the secret to matchmaking, said Harry T. Reis of the University of Rochester, one of the authors of last year’s critique.
“That agreeable person that you happen to be matching up with me would, in fact, get along famously with anyone in this room,” Dr. Reis told Dr. Gonzaga.
He and his co-authors argued that eHarmony’s results could merely reflect the well-known “person effect”: an agreeable, non-neurotic, optimistic person will tend to fare better in any relationship. But the research demonstrating this effect also showed that it’s hard to make predictions based on what’s called a dyadic effect — how similar the partners are to each other.
“In the existing literature, similarity components are notoriously weak at accounting for relationship satisfaction,” said Paul W. Eastwick of the University of Texas, Austin. “For example, what really matters for my relationship satisfaction is whether I myself am neurotic and, to a slightly lesser extent, whether my partner is neurotic. Our similarity on neuroticism is irrelevant.”
by John Tierney, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Viktor Koen
