No Pic? No Problem.
Written by Helen Guo
The discussion surrounding race and dating is still rather taboo. We’ve all seen, experienced, or heard of the exclusionary preferences that some put on their dating profiles – “No Blacks” or “I only date Asian girls”. Those statements are easy to pick out as discriminatory because they exclude based on race alone, and as we become more educated on racism, we can also easily condemn those so called racial “preferences”.
However, not everyone puts their money (or in this case their dating life) where their mouth is. Christian Rudder, the founder of OkCupid, dissected the data from his company’s platform and saw that from 2009 to 2014, there was a significant increase in users claiming to have no racial preference. However, their activity on the app says otherwise. Black men receive the least number of responses by a large margin compared to their white counterparts. Meanwhile, Asian and Hispanic women are more likely to interact with white men than those of their own race. Black women had the lowest response rate from any race, including black men.
While the reasons for this disparity are rooted in a complex matrix of factors that are social, cultural, and familial in nature, what we can say for certain is that despite believing we have no racial preference, our actions do not reflect those beliefs.
This is called implicit bias.
Unlike the explicit racial bans people declare on their profile, implicit biases are preconceived notions that affect our actions and decisions unconsciously. Oftentimes, they do not align with our declared beliefs, yet we ourselves do not realize it. Everyone has implicit bias, and this becomes especially apparent when it comes to race and dating.
If you’re curious about your own implicit biases, Harvard University has just the test for you https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
These biases not only puts certain groups at a disadvantage when joining the online dating scene, but they also limit everyone’s dating pool. By letting race influence your dating decisions, even if it’s subconscious, you miss out on the opportunity to connect with someone you may have really liked.
But if we can’t recognize our own biases, how are we expected to change our behaviours to match our beliefs? In this case, the onus is not on the user, but the dating apps themselves.
With online dating becoming an increasingly popular way to meet people, the question then becomes
“How do we re-engineer the infrastructure of dating apps to lessen racial bias?”
Heartcade is one such dating app that believes race shouldn’t compromise love. The app is designed so that when you create your profile, there are no pictures or visual clues as to what you look like. Instead, you get to choose an animated character to represent you, as well as an alias. This allows you to match with others based on the interests and information they put in their description – not their race or appearance.
Only after 3 days of conversation will you be given the option to reveal yourself to your match. Only if you both choose to do this will you be able to see each other’s profiles complete with pictures. Heartcade’s philosophy is that finding love should be based on genuine attraction to your partner’s personality, something that is often glossed over when people make judgements upfront (conscious or unconscious) based on someone’s race.
With online dating becoming a permanent infrastructure in our daily lives, it is important to take a step back and evaluate how the platforms we use reflect our racial behaviours. It is perhaps even more crucial then that dating apps themselves realize the role they play in the fight against racial discrimination in order to better design their systems.
Heartcade is an example of the new wave of online dating, one that pushes for your dating behaviours to truly match your egalitarian values.
We’re now taking applications from Ontario university students to participate in the biggest blind dating event ever.
