Official News - page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: DATING SITE PORKY PIES

by Hazed

Internet dating is fraught with deception - isn't it? That's what everyone thinks, anyway. After all, who couldn't resist the opportunity to lie about themselves in order to give a good impression to prospective dates.

Now a study has compared the online profiles on these dating sites with the real life people behind them, and discovered that yes, most daters do lie, but only a little bit.

"People were lying strategically. They told small lies that improved how they looked, but not so large that they would get busted if the daters met," said one of the researchers. Jeff Hancock and his team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York weighed and measured 40 male and 40 female daters from New York City and noted the age on their driver's licenses. They then compared these results with the online profiles of the daters.

Nearly 9 out of 10 of the participants in the study lied at least once. Weight was the trait most often lied about, and age the least. There were also differences between the lies told by men and women: all of the women who lied about their weight pretended to be lighter than they were, while most of the men who lied about their height made themselves out to be taller. The heavier the women, and the shorter the men, the more likely they were to tell fibs.

But the vast majority of those oh-so-frequent lies were small enough that they were not very likely to found out in face-to-face meetings. The average difference between what the profile said, and what was real, was 6 pounds in weight , one-third of an inch in height, and just 5 months in age.

So the bad reputation that these online sites have seems to stem from a few really big lies, which are bound to be discovered and then talked about. The worst that Hancock's survey uncovered were 2 inches in height, 35 pounds in weight, and 11 years in age. Those are some whoppers!

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