Matchmaking is now done primarily by algorithms, according to new research from Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. His new study shows that most heterosexual couples today meet online.

This exhibit features the conference papers presented at these workshops dating back to 1993. SITE is funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) with additional support from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Stanford School of Humanities & Sciences. Stanford University, one of the world's leading teaching and research institutions, is dedicated to finding solutions to big challenges and to preparing students for leadership in a complex world. Stanford-affiliated singles, aged 50+, socializing in casual environments. The Club sponsors a variety of activities such as Meet & Mingle, parties, dances, trips, and attendance at plays, concerts and exhibits. Weekly activities include tennis, hiking, and lectures. Non-members are welcome at most events. The modern serendipity that is coming across your soulmate out of millions of profiles is more likely than you think: Two Stanford sociologists found that online dating is officially the most. Online Dating in Stanford Kentucky, United States Loveawake is a top-performing online dating site with members present in United States and many other countries. Loveawake has over a million registered singles and over 1000 new men and women are joining daily. With all these statistics you are almost guaranteed to meet your Stanford match.

By Alex Shashkevich

Algorithms, and not friends and family, are now the go-to matchmaker for people looking for love, Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld has found.

Online dating has become the most common way for Americans to find romantic partners. (Image credit: altmodern / Getty Images)

In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Rosenfeld found that heterosexual couples are more likely to meet a romantic partner online than through personal contacts and connections. Since 1940, traditional ways of meeting partners – through family, in church and in the neighborhood – have all been in decline, Rosenfeld said.

Rosenfeld, a lead author on the research and a professor of sociology in the School of Humanities and Sciences, drew on a nationally representative 2017 survey of American adults and found that about 39 percent of heterosexual couples reported meeting their partner online, compared to 22 percent in 2009. Sonia Hausen, a graduate student in sociology, was a co-author of the paper and contributed to the research.

Rosenfeld has studied mating and dating as well as the internet’s effect on society for two decades.

Stanford News Service interviewed Rosenfeld about his research.

What’s the main takeaway from your research on online dating?

Meeting a significant other online has replaced meeting through friends. People trust the new dating technology more and more, and the stigma of meeting online seems to have worn off.

In 2009, when I last researched how people find their significant others, most people were still using a friend as an intermediary to meet their partners. Back then, if people used online websites, they still turned to friends for help setting up their profile page. Friends also helped screen potential romantic interests.

What were you surprised to find?

I was surprised at how much online dating has displaced the help of friends in meeting a romantic partner. Our previous thinking was that the role of friends in dating would never be displaced. But it seems like online dating is displacing it. That’s an important development in people’s relationship with technology.

What do you believe led to the shift in how people meet their significant other?

There are two core technological innovations that have each elevated online dating. The first innovation was the birth of the graphical World Wide Web around 1995. There had been a trickle of online dating in the old text-based bulletin board systems prior to 1995, but the graphical web put pictures and search at the forefront of the internet. Pictures and search appear to have added a lot to the internet dating experience. The second core innovation is the spectacular rise of the smart phone in the 2010s. The rise of the smart phone took internet dating off the desktop and put it in everyone’s pocket, all the time.

Also, the online dating systems have much larger pools of potential partners compared to the number of people your mother knows, or the number of people your best friend knows. Dating websites have enormous advantages of scale. Even if most of the people in the pool are not to your taste, a larger choice set makes it more likely you can find someone who suits you.

Does your finding indicate that people are increasingly less social?

No. If we spend more time online, it does not mean we are less social.

When it comes to single people looking for romantic partners, the online dating technology is only a good thing, in my view. It seems to me that it’s a basic human need to find someone else to partner with and if technology is helping that, then it’s doing something useful.

The decline of meeting partners through family isn’t a sign that people don’t need their family anymore. It’s just a sign that romantic partnership is taking place later in life.

In addition, in our study we found that the success of a relationship did not depend on whether the people met online or not. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how you met your significant other, the relationship takes a life of its own after the initial meeting.

What does your research reveal about the online world?

I think that internet dating is a modest positive addition to our world. It is generating interaction between people that we otherwise wouldn’t have.

People who have in the past had trouble finding a potential partner benefit the most from the broader choice set provided by the dating apps.

Internet dating has the potential to serve people who were ill-served by family, friends and work. One group of people who was ill-served was the LGBTQ+ community. So the rate of gay couples meeting online is much higher than for heterosexual couples.

You’ve studied dating for over two decades. Why did you decide to research online dating?

The landscape of dating is just one aspect of our lives that is being affected by technology. And I always had a natural interest in how new technology was overturning the way we build our relationships.

I was curious how couples meet and how has it changed over time. But no one has looked too deeply into that question, so I decided to research it myself.

Stanford's Department of Economics hosts its signature annual conference known as the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics (SITE). This conference is a series of summer workshop sessions in economic theory and mathematical economics.

SITE was founded in 1989 and its workshops present theoretical and empirical work on almost every topic in economics, including behavioral and experimental, computational, development, economic history, finance, industrial organization, labor, macroeconomics, and public. The goal is to contribute to the

'dissemination of scientific knowledge, to strengthen both empirical and theoretical economic analysis and research methods, and to improve the understanding of the processes and institutions of the U.S. economy and of the world system of which it is a part. Its purpose is to advance economic science for the benefit of society and to support cutting-edge work of economic theorists within specialized areas of research.'

Each SITE session is organized by leading senior researchers from more than one institution in a specified topic area. The organizing committee reviews submitted conference papers and invites the authors whose papers have been accepted to give an oral presentation on the preliminary results of their economic research to an audience of established scholars and peers. SITE serves as a venue for researchers to receive feedback on their paper from experts in the same field, for networking, discussion, and collaboration. This exhibit features the conference papers presented at these workshops dating back to 1993.

SITE is funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) with additional support from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Stanford School of Humanities & Sciences, Department of Economics.

Visit the SITE website for information about the next SITE conference.

• Proceed to Conferences 1993-present to see browse categories by each conference year, or use the date and author facets on the left-hand side of this page, or the search bar located at the top right of this page.
• To search across the full text of papers in the collection: enter any keyword in the search bar, select “Full text” from the search drop-down menu, and click the search icon. Each result will link to the paper with matching keywords highlighted. A video tutorial demonstrating full-text search is also available: https://youtu.be/ZEDDpLQvBdM.

Stanford Your Dating Sites

Please note that reports from 1989 - 1992 will be added to this collection at a future point.