Why People Behave Badly on Dating apps

Dating today comes with plenty of pitfalls. Yet if a stranger began chatting up someone in a pub, few people would respond directly with, “No, you’re too short for me, and I don’t think I’ll like your politics – please remove yourself from my orbit.” Similarly, most men wouldn’t expose their genitalia before saying a word on a first date. And very few people would abruptly walk out of a coffee shop mid-conversation, leaving behind a person they’d been seeing for weeks.

1-Daters behaving badly

‘Bad behaviour’ on dating apps ranges widely, from the relatively innocuous but presumptuous pick-up line (“hey gorgeous, what are we doing tonight”), to full-blown threats and abuse. But many of the most common transgressions fall somewhere in the middle.

This includes infidelity. Dana Weiser, an associate professor at Texas Tech University, US, whostudies infidelity, became interested in examining this phenomenon on Tinder after one of her undergraduate research assistants mentioned she’d seen her friend’s boyfriend on the app. He was posing as single, and the friend didn’t know how to deal with it. Sympathetic to – and intrigued by – her student’s dilemma, Weiser began collecting data from 550 undergraduate students about infidelity on Tinder, which was published in a 2018 study.

2-A lot of negative emotions’

Generally, women are disproportionately affected by online dating bad behaviour. But this is particularly the case with what LeFebvre believes is the biggest issue on dating apps: “unsolicited, explicit sexting messages”. Through her research, she’s found – unsurprisingly – the targets of these messages are mostly women.

3- We gradually drop our standards’

As these kinds of actions proliferate across online dating, there’s a problematic side effect: “Some of the bad behaviour becomes more normative,” says LeFebvre. And this growing acceptance has caused these online transgressions to bleed into people’s off-screen lives, too.

For instance, the endless swiping culture of online dating can make people more dismissive of others’ humanity – and potentially make them act more callously. Online, the endless stream of user photos may practically feel no different from the colourful jellybeans raining down their screens when they play Candy Crush. So, even when app users meet dates in person, they’ve become conditioned to this dismissive dating app culture, and more naturally defer to insensitive behaviours like ghosting, even after an in-person date.

The business of online dating hasn’t made everyone worse, however; on the upside, LeFebvre has noticed in her work that sometimes, poor conduct on dating apps can inspire those who experience it to do better. Among those who were ghosted and found the behaviour to be particularly harmful to them psychologically, some take note to not ever hurt anyone else that same way. This, unfortunately, was a “small category” of the people LeFebvre studied.

Ultimately, then, many daters have had to growing thicker skins to guard against hurt, if they stay in the dating game. And many people have become resigned to dating simply being an unpleasant process, says LeFebvre, because they’ve been on the receiving end of bad behaviours so many times.

Overwhelmingly, the burden of having to filter through so many people on dating apps, not knowing who will send an unsolicited nude photo and who will show up with flowers on date two, can cause users to “accept” the negative behaviours along with the good ones, suggests Orlando.

“We get used to communication like that and it becomes part of [a] relationship, and probably the next one and the one after that,” she says, affecting in the long-term what people see as acceptable parts of dating. “We gradually drop our standards.”

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