Online Dating Profiles - How Many People Are Telling The Truth.

Lying in online dating is much more common than you might think. When you’re dating online you must take all you hear with a grain of salt and be wary of anything that sounds like it might be a tall tale. Lying in online dating is most common when people give their height and their weight and almost as often their age. A college study just completed will be published in the spring in an annual human behavior journal and presented at a conference on the subject of human behavior as well. 

Going through a very systematic survey process the researchers quantified the lying in online dating. They reported that men generally overstated their height and women commonly took several pounds off their weight. Lying about age in online dating was not quite as common. 53 percent of men lied were lying about how tall they were while they were dating online, and 39 percent of women did so. 64 percent of women lied about how much they weighed, while 61 percent of men did. 24 percent of online dating males were found to lie about their age, while only 13 percent of women did so.

Researchers looked at four prominent U.S. online dating portals, where the users created their profiles and initiated the contacts with potential dates. Participants in the study were recruited through online classified ads in a classified Web site and an alternative newspaper. 80 people participated, 40 of which were women, and 40 were men.

 

Researchers started their study of lying in online dating by collecting the detailed information from each participant’s online profile. They then determined the authenticity of the ages, heights and weights by measuring and weighing each participant and verifying the date of birth on their driver's licenses.
 
They considered them to be lying in online dating when the difference between their profile height and their actual height was more than half an inch. To be considered a lie about weight it had to be off by more than five pounds. 

The head of the research study said that men in general look for physical attractiveness and youth in their partner, but that women look for good providers and social status indicators such as career and education. The online dating pattern of lying, while frequent, is slight, they discovered. The decision was that participants were trying to balance a perception of honesty with a perception of attractiveness. So, while most don’t lie about major things like the lack of a college degree, their income (most who don’t want to be truthful simply decline to disclose) and their marital status, many do shed a few pounds in their profiles and/or add a few inches.

The result of this prevalence for lying in online dating has led many dating sites to resort to terms such as “slim,” “average,” “a few extra pounds,” and “heavy” for descriptions of body instead of asking for the actual weight.