It’s easy to be lazy when uploading your dating profile. Many of us fill in the minimal amount of text and just pull in the latest of our Facebook profile photos.
But as study after study brings to light, there are lots of things you can do to boost your match potential, be it having a full bio, ditching the fish-pout selfies or including certain hobbies under your interests.
And a new study has just come out to show what online daters find most endearing in a potential partners profile. And being endearing doesn’t sound so bad to us.
The study conducted by The University of California has outlined what makes people stop and click when surfing the dater-web, and apparently it all comes down to… your pose!
That’s right, body language really does speak louder than words – even down to the snaps we chose to upload online.
Head researcher on the project Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk, a student of Human Behaviour, looked at videos of people speed dating and analysed the photographs on peoples online dating profiles and found that people who had open, expansive body language doubled their chances of being rated attractive by others, and such poses made them twice as likely to score a date.
To put it into words Vacharkulksemsuk said the most successful poses were ones that show “an enlargement of the amount of space that a person is occupying.”
Maybe all the seat space-hogging men on the bus knew this key piece of info all along…
It may sounds obvious now we think about it, but such open and wide poses give off the impression that a person is well-to-do and confident. And we all know confidence is the sexiest thing, really.
In the split second that people have to suss a person out before swiping left or right, it’s understandable that the perfect picture can mean everything.
“Within milliseconds, we can pick up a suite of information about a person, with social dominance and hierarchical standing being one of those things” asserts Vacharkulksemsuk.
In the words of Ursula - the sea witch of The Little Mermaid fame - “Don't underestimate the importance of… body language!”