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OREM — A group of Brigham Young University students recently used a popular dating application to perform a social experiment on unsuspecting fellow students in Utah Valley.
Tinder, a mobile dating application for iPhones, has exploded in popularity in recent months. Users swipe through profile pictures of people near them, indicating when they are interested in another person. If the interest is mutual, the two are able to contact one another.
The app has enough of a following at BYU to have garnered an article in the school's paper about it. Its success in Provo led three BYU students to ask a question: How many men would show up to meet a girl with whom they had had only the briefest of interactions?
"We weren't sure we'd be willing to do it … We didn't think that many people would. And we were proven wrong," Bowman Bagley, a junior at the school, told the Huffington Post.
Tinder requires a Facebook profile to log in, so Bagley and his roommates set up an account for a fake 21-year-old named Sammy. They uploaded a few photos taken from Miss Teen USA Kendall Fein's online profile and spent an hour "liking" every guy the app showed them.
About 250 people were matched with "Sammy," and the roommates messaged each of them about a potential date.
"I'm going to yogurt shop called yogurtland tonight at 9 in orem with some girl friends if you want to meet up ;)" Sammy wrote.
What happened was something no one expected: about six dozen men showed up at the frozen yogurt shop to meet the fictional young woman. What happened next was described on the blog of a student with a connection to Bagley:
"We walked toward the door to see groups and groups and groups of guys getting out of their cars, hustling into the building. I could not believe it! They were swarming! Literally swarming!" the blogger, who describes herself as a friend of a friend of Bagley's, wrote.
"Some were waiting outside, trying to look casual. ... Some groups were standing together, looking around, looking cool… Picture a wall full of men standing in a yogurt shop on a Thursday night, with no intent of tasting the yogurt," she continued.
Bagley told the Huffington Post by the time he deleted the fake profile two days later, he had received multiple messages from those he had fooled — some who had missed out on Yogurtland and wanted to make it up on Saturday, and others who had been stood up. Bagley responded to each one, "social media experiment."
Those involved in the experiment, as well as those who have read about it since, have expressed shock that it worked so well. Tinder is the 20th-most-popular social networking app on iOS and is downloaded more than 20,000 times a day.
The app touts its secrecy, in part, as a reason to use it. Although a Facebook profile is required to sign up, nothing is posted to a user's Facebook wall. And the closest a Tinder user can typically get to finding someone he or she is connected to is a friend of a friend.
The blogger who posted about her observations of the experiment questioned what could be taken from it.
"Is this telling of the desperation of males? The ‘toolish' nature of some men? The naivety of people? The decline of classic dating of our culture? The lack of chivalry in meeting women? Our dependency on social media to initiate human interaction?" she wrote. "You decide."
Top image credit: alittlebitoflizzy.wordpress.com
