“KEEP PLAYING:” THE THE ISSUE WITH TINDER AND THE GAMIFICATION OF DATING
When you swipe through Tinder, are you serious about finding a partner, or are you simply playing a game of picking and choosing the most attractive people in the hopes of matching with them?
If you get the sense that Tinder isn’t actually leading you to finding good matches, you may be on to something. Digging into the history of the app’s development, and the evolution of its business strategy, reveals that your experience isn’t an anomaly - it’s actually built into the app’s design. Launched in 2012, Tinder was created to be used in quick bursts and on-the-go– a very different experience from dating sites like Match.com, which feature lengthy bios and require more time and thought when considering potential matches.
Why Tinder founders created a hook-up game
When Justin Mateen and Sean Rad met at the University of Southern California, their different personalities tied them together and inspired them to create an app that would disrupt the current dating industry landscape.
They knew they wanted to create a mobile-first platform that takes the awkwardness out of approaching people in person to show romantic interest. Most importantly, the founders admit that they always saw the Tinder interface as a game: the motion and the reaction mimics a card game, with users shuffling through profiles, thus creating the addictive hallmark “swipe” action unique to the platform. And for the founders, it doesn’t matter whether or not users actually find a relationship. During an interview with TIME magazine, Rad admits that “nobody joins Tinder because they’re looking for something. They join because they want to have fun. It doesn’t even matter if you match because swiping is so fun.”
Built during a campus-wide hackathon computing competition, the app took off on USC’s campus and it’s still most widely used amongst the 18-24 demographic.
The psychology of the swipe
But Tinder is more than just a game - its design is a digital manifestation of operant conditioning, a psychological phenomenon in which the human brain can be trained to repeat reward-seeking behaviors.
In an interview with Jo Sales, director of documentary Swiped: Hooking Up in the Digital Age, Jonathan Badeen (the third co-founder of Tinder), shares that the infamous “swipe” interface is a digital example of operant conditioning that duplicates results from a historic experiment by psychologist B.F. Skinner. The experiment found that feeding pigeons at random intervals caused the birds to peck endlessly at trays in the hopes that food would eventually appear.
Users swiping through Tinder are enacting this behavior modification process as they spend hours shuffling through profiles, hoping to find a profile that also swiped right on them. To fully understand how this operant conditioning works on Tinder, you just have to find your first match; then, the app sends a message - “keep playing” - to remind you to continue swiping.
Operant Conditioning and the Paradox of Choice: How Tinder Holds Users Hostage
Of course Tinder is designed to keep users continually rewarded whenever they open the app, but it also keeps users on the app with hope of endless choices and matches. The paradox of choice that’s built into the app ensures that there’s always more matches to explore and consider; when in reality, there’s probably only a few people who will be great partners for you based on shared values and interests, personality traits, and life goals. The hundreds of people we see each day on Tinder do not accurately reflect our real world possibilities for love, so the more we’re trapped in the app’s easy reward system, the fewer opportunities we give ourselves to truly meet and get to know potential matches.
