Putting your ‘Worst’ foot forward: How can we make dating apps more honest?
“Honesty and humour are important in the dating world. A laugh is honest - the honesty of that is thrilling… And the immediacy of the instant feedback from the audience.” - Jared
When we are looking for a date, people often say how important it is that they can make you laugh. This is especially true when looking for a long-term relationship. But wit is often difficult (and sometimes dangerous) to convey online, where tone, timing, and emphasis are lost. But how much does it matter when looking for love?
How can humour win you love, and can you 'laugh someone into bed'? These are among the serious and silly questions that I will address with our guests, Jonny Ford and Jared Fryer. They are professional writers and comedians who formed their business by providing comedy writing workshops to copywriters and creatives in the advertising sector: Just Ad Comedy, (who doesn't enjoy a funny ad?) where they create joke-writing workshops for businesses, especially ad agencies. So they say, they are obsessed with the question: ‘What makes something funny?’
I looked to learn that, and other things in our discussion about: Putting your Worst foot forward: How can we make dating apps more honest? I wanted to focus on the lack of honesty often displayed by users on dating apps, which creates so much disheartenment among users. Jonny and Jared believe that they have found the solution to this, with their dating app 'Worst'.
We all want to make a good first impression, but online platforms such as dating apps allow people to manicure their appearance and personality through online impression management. This makes it very difficult to get a real sense of who you are speaking to, when all you really need to know, according to Jared, are two things: is there a modicum of physical attraction, and are there any immediate disqualifiers?
“The flaw in dating of all kinds is that it’s all lies… An AI deepfake has nothing on a dating profile.” - Jonny
You can’t uninvent dating apps, like VX nerve gas or Oxycontin, but ‘Worst’ would aim to inject some honesty by getting the prospective dater to outline the worst thing about them on the platform on three metrics: appearance, behaviour and character. Worst would work therefore to combat ‘the first date chameleon effect’ - where you tell someone exactly what you think they want to hear in order to achieve their strategic aims from the meet: a kiss, a second date, a weekend away etc.
Whether an ‘honesty box’ app would work and provide the right incentives for users not to try to cheat the system is an open question. Honesty boxes only work when you feel a trust and kinship with a certain defined community - a high-trust society is required for this to function as intended. If everyone is bending the rules, then you will be at a competitive disadvantage if you don’t follow suit. Is this currently the case online, or in significant conurbations where app usage tends to be high? I have my doubts, as much as I would love to see honesty flourish online.
Like the #nomakeupselfie trend of the last decade, fads intended to promote the virtues of unvarnished honesty can quickly develop into their own arms race of virtue signalling. ‘Worst’ would only allow you to upload your passport photo as your profile picture, to avoid airbrushing and filters. Given that women tend to wear makeup to improve their appearance in a way men don’t, and smiling is not allowed in passport photos, my hypothesis would be that this feature would favour men. Perhaps female users would find it a relief and less pressure.
“You could introduce social proofing measures to the app to mitigate the porkies and reintroduce the accountability of a small community or hunter-gather group.” - Jonny
Jonny and Jared spoke about how important a framework for accountability was, like that found in Stone Age hunter-gather tribes. Social proofing features - a ‘Community Notes for people’ - would weed out bad actors and those trying to game the system, perhaps working a bit like the infamous Facebook group, ‘Are we dating the same guy?’ Jonny referred to Game Theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma when explaining why these measures on the app were necessary - “You don’t have to uphold a reputation on dating apps at the moment.”
According to a 2018 survey, 44% of Londoners are single. This sounds like a lot of potential matches, but how important is the role of humour in standing out from the crowd? This is especially true if we move to more AI-written homogeneous dating profiles. Dr Martin Graff on a previous TGRC? episode discussed how humour exemplifies risk-taking behaviour and the imperative, particularly for men, to display creative intelligence - as exhibited by making jokes - to show that they ultimately had good genes for a potential mate. But the comedians were unconvinced of this as the sole providence of our attraction to being funny. “A sense of humour is common sense dancing”, according to Jonny. To be amusing, is to exhibit that you have both common sense and the creativity to play with it.
Jared thought that there doesn’t necessarily have to be a rational explanation as to why we find people who are hilarious attractive: “Sometimes attraction is completely random - like specific spots in a bird’s feathers.” Humour is perhaps the peacock's tail of human evolution, then - an inextricable extravagance. In evolutionary biology, this is known as the ‘sexy son’ hypothesis: where features that do not increase male survival fitness are selected for over generations anyway by the crowding-in of female sexual choice. If you think that other women will find deep-set eyes more attractive, then it makes sense for you to select a male (assuming a decent level of heritability to the subsequent generation, the F1 as it is called in the lab) exhibiting that trait, as whilst it may not increase their chances of survival, it may increase their chance of passing on your genes to the next generation, which is ultimately all that matters for natural selection.
The power and charismatic draw of humour is evident in many facets of life, not least politics. As Jonny says in the magazine piece, ‘We’ll even vote for a megalomaniac, so long as he raises a chuckle’. The US President, Donald Trump, partially owes his landslide election victory to his comic timing and humourous campaign appearances. Working in McDonald's and driving a garbage truck were stunts that comically worked because they juxtaposed the perceived humourless and sanctimonious Democrats. The funny factor has also been evident in UK politics, known perhaps more commonly as the ‘The Pub Test’: of the leaders, who would you rather go for a pint with? Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage have previously rated highly on this seemingly superfluous metric. Their electoral success shows that being a witty raconteur really does matter in how people think of you.
With Jonny and Jared, we discussed the importance of honesty in humour, such as through the primacy of observational comedy. Cleverness isn’t actually that funny (phew) they said, whereas honesty shows a struggling human with relatable strife, and the audience shares this moment of indignity with them. Perhaps that is why we dislike dishonesty so much in dating; you are not being real with the other person or yourself. One of the other problems with the apps is that they are affecting our behaviour in the real world, with Jonny thinking that they make us less likely to approach each other, fearing rejection or appearing to be a bother.
“The apps conspire with male cowardice… I may see someone I like, but with five matches in my pocket, am I going to take the risk of approaching someone? … Ghosting hurts, but it is nothing compared to a big fat NO to your face.” - Jonny
What about the future - is comedy automation-proof? Whilst it is difficult to predict the effect of AI on humour, Jared hoped that they would be safe for now, but Jonny wasn’t so sure. First, they came for the white collar jobs, and I said… “Grox, you may not have a soul, but that is zinging satire.”
If not the influences of technology, what cultural memes have inspired our jocular pair? Jared worried that the love of his favourite comedy, Seinfeld, had played an unfortunate role in the minds of his compatriots when it comes to dating: that of the endless childhood - where you reject a succession of partners for the most trivial reasons, happy in the knowledge that there will always be someone else to come along and take their place. On favourite romcoms, Jonny opted for the classic friends-become-lovers tale of When Harry Met Sally. Jared however made the case that buddy films like Starsky & Hutch are the same as a romcom in format - two people meet, they don’t like each other because of their differences, they are pushed apart but then realise they can’t live without each other, then are brought back together to solve one final problem. Philia and perms, brotherly love and Bacardi and cola, do it do it for Jared.
Jonny said that relationships should be a process of mutual education, as the philosopher Alain de Botton has advocated for, where both parties honestly state the faults in the other and how they can improve. Perhaps modern romance needs less romanticism and a dose of honest realism. Jonny reflected that so often we are being sold something by romcoms that doesn’t exist, therefore the strapline for their Worst dating app would be ‘Finding your imperfect match’. A noble aim, that we can all but hope for.