Attention statements: grammatical errors formally make you less attractive

Doctoral candidate Tess van der Zanden says, “There is very little information available on a person’s profile, often just a picture and a few sentences. Accordingly, you have to determine if you find someone attractive. So it’s all under a magnifying glass.” Among other things, she investigated the effect of language errors in someone’s dating profile on the impression a person leaves behind.

“me” instead of “my”

Mistakes are often made, they quickly become clear after a small survey. Common errors are dt, “me” instead of “mine” and of course standard typos. some examples:

For the study, Van der Zanden compared 12,000 dating profiles from different sites and apps and asked the data about their impressions of the profiles. Participants were also shown different versions of the dummy profiles: with linguistic errors and without errors.

Profiles with syntax errors always contain more than one error. However, up to a third of the participants did not notice the errors at all. Among the people who did notice, the result was significant: Grammatical errors or grammatical errors almost always had a negative impact on how people think about someone’s attractiveness and personality.

Typos were associated with confusion and grammatical errors made the person appear less intelligent to the participants. Language errors also made participants think less about someone’s personality.

Another part of the study involved tracking the eye movements people made when viewing a dating profile. “We wanted to see how important the text on a person’s profile is compared to a photo,” says Van der Zanden. “Is the text less important if there is a picture next to it? And does it still matter how attractive the person in the picture is?”

Is gravity important?

As expected, people often looked at the photo first, however, interest in the end lingered longer on the text. “The attractiveness of the person in the photo did not determine the interest in the text, nor the impact of any linguistic errors.”

Thus, with an attractive person, the participants were no longer tolerant of language errors. Something has been suggested in the literature so far, according to van der Zanden.

This is called the corona effect. This is the tendency to judge someone favorably, based on only one aspect of the person, for example attractive appearance. So that kite was not applied in this study.

Here’s how to improve your dating profile:

After research, Van der Zanden also has a number of tips for those drawing up a dating profile. “Pay attention to both the image and the text, because people pay attention to both. Also pay attention to how you describe yourself and the words you use.”

Authenticity in features is well recorded in the survey, especially in the use of metaphors and figurative language. So do not say, for example: “I can cook well”, but: “I am a star in the kitchen.”