Online Dating and Interracial Marriage
While traditional dating may have consisted of a conversation over a quick cup of coffee with someone you met in the workplace or through mutual friends, technology is changing the way dating is done nowadays. In particular, dating websites have allowed people of all sorts of background to meet. This article from the MIT Technology Review focuses on how online dating has influenced the levels of interracial marriage and how this changes the racial diversity of society. In class, we talked about how we can view society as a network with links between people that know each other. Furthermore, this network graph is, for the most part, interconnected such that there exists some path from someone to someone else (six degrees of separation). The researchers mentioned in the article found that although people are unlikely to date their best friends, they are likely to date friends of friends. It is likely that friends of friends know each other already to some extent because of the Strong Triadic Closure Property. So with traditional dating, it’s not like the global network is actively changing. However, online dating has changed that completely because people from completely different areas and cultures can meet. This new realm of dating creates links that were completely nonexistent before.
To model the network of society, researchers split nodes into two groups: men and women (with randomly distributed races) with the assumption that everyone wants to marry a person of the opposite sex, and that people can only marry someone who they already have a connection with. This is actually a bipartite graph, since our two sets of nodes are men and women, and all links are from one node in one set to another node in another set. As predicted, by adding random links to the graph, the researchers found that the number of interracial marriages would skyrocket. Finally, the researchers linked the data they found to the increasing proportion of interracial marriages over time in the U.S.. Although they cannot completely prove causation, it is strongly likely that online dating websites are the forces driving this racial diversity in society.