JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

With the popularity of online dating, adolescents and young adults must increasingly rely on limited cues to make initial judgments about potential partners, including judgments about sexual risk. Decision makers rely on heuristics to assess risk when they lack statistical estimates. Individuals who rely on representativeness judge the probability of an event by how well it embodies the essential features of the process that might produce it.

Objective:

We predicted that, in the context of online dating, an attractiveness heuristic would be used to inform risk assessments, where, consistent with the literature on halo effects, decision makers judge more attractive people to be less likely to have STIs.

Methods:

In a survey experiment, we asked participants to determine which individuals in 20 sets of paired photos were enrolled in a personals site for people with publicly-disclosed STIs.

Results:

We find that, despite financial incentives for accuracy and high levels of self-confidence in their judgments, participants performed no better than chance at identifying individuals with STIs. Contrary to our hypothesis, more attractive people were judged to be more likely to have an STI. The relationship between appears to be mediated by perceptual cues of the target individuals’ number of partners, with more attractive individuals seen as having more partners.

Conclusions:

Adolescents and young adults may be using attractiveness as a cue for sexual risk. In addition to their practical implications, for risk-taking mediated by online dating sites, these results suggest the challenges of predicting the results of reliance on heuristic thinking.