Maybe one day someone will use Tinder data for real scientific research. I think a post-modern study on this could bring a new perspective to what Hofstede did on culture traces on the IBM Employee database 40 years ago.
But while this doesn't happen, let me have a bit more fun by analyzing some interesting findings about how Brazilian women behave on the app. And before anyone label me as a sexist or something like that, I must say I'm concentrating in women because this is the pool I've interacted with. Some of my conclusions may also apply to male behavior and maybe a girl could partner with me for sketching this other side of this picture. I don't have the intention to diminish anyone here.
What I want to show is that Tinder is really similar to any other high information asymmetry environment, such as the used cars market. Thus it requires a bit of attention and effort to provide users with meaningful actual social experiences. I'll draw from direct observation to back this up.
Tinder use is basically driven by two different conflicting desires. The first and most obvious one is to find attractive people to interact with and meet. This is usually what motivates people to install the app in the first place. But usually the second reason is what keeps people coming back to the app everyday, somehow addicted to it: the inner wish to be considered attractive by other people. At a first glance, the two goals may appear to go hand in hand. But in fact this is not the case. Let's take a look at its underlying rationale.
Thinking about logistics of busy people's life (to which Tinder usually appeals), it's much more frequent and less time consuming to have a match in the app than meeting interesting people in real life. Meeting takes time, effort, coordination, and experience shows it's often disappointing (we'll come back to this in a moment). Therefore, behaviors that would otherwise seem irrational become indeed widespread.
Perhaps because people in general accept and admit easily the first motivation to use the app (the meeting part), because finding a life mate is usually considered important even by those who don't reserve much time for that in the real world. But the second motivation may feel so small and petty, that probably it's a bit harder to admit it, even for one's own self.
However, after putting some thought on the patterns the women's pictures exhibit, it becomes fairly easy to make some deductions that point exactly to privileging this second internal agenda over the first and more obvious one. Curiously, often times the pictures chosen by them to illustrate their profile, exhibit characteristics of an old film negative. Lighter parts correspond to the dark opposite shade in the revealed picture.
An example of that is the presence of full body pictures in the profile. There's an epidemics of excess body weight in the world, which means most of the population is above ideal weight as defined by public health agencies. At the same time, all sorts of media reinforce the stereotype of attractive women as being thin. The result is that by this simple fact, most people fall out of the standards attractive category. As a result, almost all the thin girls use full body pictures on their profiles while the others don't.
In real life, so many people engage in great efforts to comply with this socially accepted standard. They go on diets, exercise intensely, even get surgery of several kinds. In Tinder, however, the visibility window is somewhat narrow, and very often people take advantage of that to hide their undesired appearance traces, showing an edited version of themselves that's actually a non-representative portrait. Maybe they don't realize it, but by doing so, they're in fact drawing upon an information barrier to passively deceive whoever they are coming across online. Even more curious than that is perhaps the fact these very people also write angry disclaimers in their own profiles against dishonest and just-sex-oriented guys in the app.
But wait, it gets even more interesting. Because sustaining this illusion relies precisely either in the fact these girls don't really have the intention to meet anyone or that they are just incapable of perceiving and accepting themselves the way they are. In the first case, it's just a classic case of asymmetrical demands that don't keep any relation with what she is willing to bring to this relationship. That's different from case number 2. This one is very similar to the behavior some people from discriminated minorities have. They simply can't accept their identity with this group because social pressure against it is too high to stand.
For both cases, the remedy to all this imbroglio is that people use Tinder first with the intention of interacting honestly with each other. This may sound tacky or moralist, and it would probably reduce the number of likes one person receives. It would surely kill a bit of the hype of being constantly ego-massaged by strangers. On the other hand, it would definitely improve the quality of these likes.
Verisimilitude in your Tinder pictures not only denotes honesty where this important character trace could easily go unnoticed. It also creates the chance for you to attract exactly the kind of people that will really like you, just for what you are, inside and out.
In conclusion, I think Tinder can be an awesome additional tool for people to meet, talk, fall in love, you name it. But since it's currently a highly information asymmetrical environment, it's key that besides demanding honesty from others, people also actually put it into practice themselves.
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