Tinder conducted a survey with 4244 respondents who weren’t exclusively Tinder users between the ages of 24 and 25 living in the US, The UK, Australia and France. Results show that 63% of the surveyed feel more confident about dating people with different ethnicities or races when online dating.

66% said that online dating services have made dating people of different races and ethnicities much easier. 79% said they have been on a date with someone of a different race compared to 62% of non-tinder users.

As tempting as applauding tinder is, for broadening their users’ horizons and for bringing together perfectly compatible people who happen to be of different racial backgrounds. But the survey focused on peoples’ attitudes toward interracial dating and their own assessments of their behavior – not their actual behavior.

In 2014 OKCupid described in a blog post, how people’s attitudes and behavior around interracial dating may drastically differ. Among its users OKCupid found the number of people who said to strongly prefer to date someone of their own race, to drop to 30% from originally 40% between 2008 and 2014.

But OKCupid founder Christian Rudder wrote within the same timeframe, “OKCupid users are certainly no more open-minded than they used to be. If anything, racial bias has intensified a bit.” Looking at results of another study by OKCupid where in 2009, Asian men on the site rated black women on average 16% less attractive than the average woman. In 2014, the same focus group rated black women approximately 20% less attractive.

A recent NPR article described how many people still face discrimination when online dating. One black woman in her late 20’s said she met a white man on Tinder and then as they were on a date “He said ‘Oh, so we have to bring the ‘hood out of you, bring the ghetto out of you!’”

Proportion of interracial marriages has increased since online dating became popular

Josué Ortega at the University of Essex in the UK and Philipp Hergovich at the University of Vienna in Austria, wrote a paper suggesting online dating should increase the number of interracial relationships. As the researchers created upwards of 10,000 randomly generated societies, then simulating connections made via online dating within these societies. “Our model predicts nearly complete racial integration upon the emerge of online dating, even if the number of partners that individuals meet from newly formed ties is small,” the authors write in the paper.

It is noted that interracial marriages have substantially increased in the US since online dating became a popular way to meet people though that is not necessarily due to online dating.

Whether or not certain preferences in online dating should be labeled “racist” is tricky. As a woman in the NPR article said, “I feel like there is room, […] to say ‘I have a preference for somebody who looks like this.’ And if that person happens to be of a certain race, its hard to blame somebody for that.” She added: “But on the other hand, you have to wonder: If racism weren’t so ingrained in our culture, would they have those preferences?”

Source: businessinsider.de