| NSF Org: |
SMA SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 7, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 11, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1520723 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Jeffrey Mantz
jmantz@nsf.gov (703)292-7783 SMA SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2015 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $851,462.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $851,462.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
5700 CASS AVE STE 4900 DETROIT MI US 48202-3692 (313)577-2424 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
5057 Woodward Detroit MI US 48202-4050 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Interdiscp Behav&SocSci IBSS |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
This interdisciplinary research project will examine the ways in which the media used by people to communicate with each other may alter perceptions of themselves and others, thereby reshaping interpersonal dynamics among those individuals. The project will focus on analyses of changing interpersonal dynamics as a result of the use of online technologies for identifying and making direct contact with others. This project will advance basic understanding of how popular online systems affect people's perceptions about technology, relationships, and themselves as well as how these perceptions affect behavior. The project will enhance knowledge about the ways that technology affects relational decision making and interpersonal behavior. It also will provide new insights regarding the ways that online systems designed to facilitate interpersonal contact impact the self-concepts of the people who use them, and it may provide new information and insights that can facilitate improvements to the design of popular forms of social computing technology. Although this project focuses on one form of online interpersonal communication, project findings will provide more generalizable insights regarding the complex interactions between communications media and the content of communications as well as their impact on communicators in many other contexts.
The investigators will integrate perspectives and approaches from communication, psychology, and information science to develop a new research approach focusing on the development and testing of a source multiplicity, attribution, recognition, and transformation model of online interaction. This new modeling approach will represent a paradigmatic shift in the way that such forms online interaction is investigated, in part because it draws on research conducted by scientists across disparate fields. The investigators will use scientific experiments, participant interviews, and behavioral measurements to investigate answers to the following types of questions: (1) How do people evaluate information communicated by algorithmic and human sources when making attributions within online systems? (2) Do people recognize how technology influences their decisions and attributions in the online communication process? (3) Given that online platforms produce a wealth of feedback to participants, how do these kinds of information from others and from the online system itself create feedback loops that affect individuals' self-concept? The investigators will assess how online systems influence multiple facets of human behavior, including formation of new relationships, information processing, decision making, interpersonal judgments/attributions, and self-perception. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Since this project’s start in 2015, online and mobile dating has emerged as the most popular way for romantic singles to search for and find partners in the United States. As its popularity grew, our team’s primary goal—to examine the key processes of online and mobile dating behavior—became even more important for society at large. In this project, our team investigated questions in four key areas: (1) how do daters present themselves to others online, (2) how do they evaluate and select potential partners through online/mobile dating platforms, (3) how do they use dating technology to interact with each other as they initiate new romantic connections, and (4) how does use of dating technology affect the ways that daters see themselves? To examine these questions, we (a) integrated theory from communication, psychology, and information studies and (b) used a blend of research methods (e.g., online experiments, surveys, and in-depth participant interviews).
Over the five-year duration of this project, we found that online and mobile dating systems did indeed influence how people saw themselves, others, and their conceptual understanding of what “romantic dating” was. We learned how dating platforms subtly affected how daters initiate, pursue, and develop new romantic relationships: For example, by directing daters attention to elements of each other’s profiles (i.e., photos, descriptive language), overall profile rankings, and algorithmic partner recommendations, we found that technology both subtly and overtly affected the mate selection decisions that daters made in the early stages of romantic relationship initiation. Our findings also indicated that daters seemed relatively unaware of the effects of technology on such behaviors; however, when prompted, daters were able to clearly articulate the influence that popular apps and sites had on their romantic decisions—as well as their overall self-concept. By investigating daters’ reflections on their personal use of technology, this project has raised collective consciousness regarding the unexpected influence that modern computing technology has had on one of the most fundamentally “human” processes, romantic love.
This project also uncovered important cultural shifts in the ways that online and mobile dating platforms are perceived by the dating public. The early stigma surrounding dating technology felt by daters ten to fifteen years ago has given way to greater acceptance—even expectation of use— especially among younger singles in America. We also discovered how daters’ personal backgrounds can affect how they appropriate and adopt popular dating sites into their lives. For example, different studies in this project examined how individuals integrated technology into their extant religious or cultural courtship and dating practices, and how daters’ sexuality affected their use of specific platform features and affordances.
This project also helped unify disparate bodies of online and mobile dating research being conducted by researchers in different scholarly disciplines: By integrating others’ work and by publishing and presenting our own results across various outlets in communication, computer science, psychology, and human-computer interaction, our team fulfilled another significant goal of this project, which was to create interdisciplinary bridges among researchers who are investigating the phenomenon of online and mobile dating in separate social scientific spheres.
In sum, this project has highlighted the space that online and mobile dating platforms now occupy in contemporary social understandings of romantic dating. Our findings have charted the adoption, meanings, and uses of dating technology among individuals with diverse cultural and religious backgrounds and sexualities. This project has demonstrated the unique ways that online and mobile dating has affected—and will continue to influence—the future of romantic mating and bonding behavior between people.
Last Modified: 11/10/2020
Modified by: Stephanie Tong
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