Hot Semiotics

Wanting to figure out what makes someone attractive on Tinder, Anne Helen Petersen created her own experimental knock-off and tested it on about 800 people. She reports her findings at buzzfeed.com.

Petersen found that race was an important factor in attraction, as was religion. Even when religion was not explicitly mentioned anywhere, people imputed religious to the faces they saw.

She discovered that “we swipe because someone’s ‘hot,’ but we find someone ‘hot’ based on unconscious codes of class, race, education level, religion, and corresponding interests embedded within the photos of their profile.”

We make up stories to explain the pictures we see: “we’re constantly inventing narratives about the people who surround us — where he works, what he loves, whether our family would like him.”

And we construct those stories out of the signs that are captured in the picture: “more than other dating services, which offer up comprehensive match dossiers, Tinder appears to encourage these narratives and crystallize the extrapolation process and package it into a five-second, low-stakes decision. We swipe, in other words, because of semiotics. . . . signs aren’t always static in their meaning – it’s all about context. Wearing a camouflage jacket can mean that you’re in the military, a hunter, a punk, a redneck, a misogynist; having a shaved head, as a girl, can connote that you’re a radical, a cancer survivor, or a lesbian.”