You decide for yourself if Tinder is ruining relationships … In an analysis of data from a nationally representative survey of more than 4,000 U. adults, Rosenfeld concludes that the Internet is beginning to displace old-school meeting places, like schools and churches, as a place for romantic introductions.

“If one believes that the health of society depends on the strength of the local traditional institutions of family, church, primary school, and neighborhood,” he writes, “then one might be reasonably concerned about the partial displacement of those traditional institutions by the Internet.” But aside from that, the news is all good: Rosenfeld found no differences in relationship quality or strength between couples who met online and couples who met off.

He is also interested in exploring how close relationships research can inform evolutionary psychological approaches (and vice versa), especially with respect to the way that relationships grow and develop over time (see a brief description of the Re CAST model here).

Additionally, his work draws from anthropological data on the time course of human evolution to make novel psychological predictions.

But too often those opinions were based on anecdotes, assumptions about human behaviour I knew to be wrong, or – worse – pure misogyny.

This latest bout comes courtesy Vanity Fair, which this week published a lengthy obituary for traditional courtship — centered, largely, on the hook-up app Tinder.He also found that online dating had been a huge boon to people in “thin dating markets” — think LGBT daters or older women — and hypothesized that marriage and partnership rates of Americans would actually rise as more of these people got online.Finkel et al’s (very lengthy) review of several top dating sites and the literature on them is basically a wash for all involves: Most sites are pretty bad, they conclude, in the sense that their matching algorithms don’t actually work.But the researchers also found that online dating can promote a “shopping” mentality—people can become judgmental and picky, focusing exclusively on factors like attractiveness or interests.And corresponding by computer for weeks or months before meeting face to face has been shown to create unrealistic expectations, he says.