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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Visual Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1572179
The Impacts of Media Richness, Blurriness, and Beautification of Online Dating Profile Visual Elements on Dating Outcomes
Provisionally accepted- 1 Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, United States
- 2 University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, Maryland, United States
Online dating is a popular way for individuals to connect today, and the visual elements of an online dating profile have become an essential part of online dating. The current study examined how media richness, visual blurriness, and beautification of an online dating profile's visual elements would influence online dating outcomes. We conducted an online dating experiment with ten different conditions with younger adults between 18 and 35 (n = 389). The results showed that the richer visual elements and the beautified selfie in an online dating profile predicted a number of dating outcomes, including stronger perceived positive traits, more favorable profile assessments, and stronger dating intentions. Moreover, we found such impacts to be gendered, where beautification did not change the assessment of the male profiles but significantly improved all assessments of the female profiles. The findings suggested some differences in how visual variations impacted online dating and revealed some interesting differences in the expectations of online dating profile visuals.
Keywords: visual self-representation, online dating, Dating profile, TINDER, media richness, visual blurriness, Beautification
Received: 06 Feb 2025; Accepted: 14 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Dai and Xia. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Minhao Dai, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, United States
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