Matching people online presents a novel form of human-computer interaction. Recently, matching apps have gone beyond the dating sector to match people for casual acquaintance’s, business connections or start-ups. However, current applications emphasize profile pictures and it is no surprise that biases such as the “What is beautiful, is good” effect, the tendency to assume better personality characteristics for attractive people, persist. Our aim is to understand how this effect unfolds in non-dating social matching and how effective app design can decrease this bias.
Robin Welsch – Aalto University