Read between the signs

(And here I am, thinking that nothing good could ever come out of Tinder or BuzzFeed...)

So I just read an incredibly fascinating article on BuzzFeed about Tinder and all of our preconceived notions about, well, everything. It's a lengthy article, but the long-and-short of it is that for a few seconds, in the time between our eyes casting first sight upon a picture of another person, and our thumb swiping left or right, there is a lot more going on in our mind than we're aware of.

First, my thoughts on how exactly this works. Think about the seconds that an NFL quarterback has between receiving the ball from the center, and passing to one of his receivers. There are dozens of judgments and decisions being made on a subconscious level, all within a few seconds. The quarterback doesn't have time to stand around and think about who to pass to...he just knows.

But how does the quarterback excel at making a decision? He does so based on a prior knowledge of formations and plays, and in the seconds between snap and pass, his brain is sifting through all that prior knowledge to reach a decision. We're no different when we're on Tinder. There exist many cues that fire certain signals in our brain, and when all of these cues fire in a span of seconds, out comes a decision - yes or no - that we didn't have to think about at all.

In the article, there are many examples of preconceived notions taking over the decision-making process, based on the social reinforcements of our culture - what a certain hairstyle implies, what a certain clothing choice says about that person's character. Tinder, despite its primary use, turns out to be a really interesting look into the signs of our society and what we find attractive.

In just one picture, there are many things that are being said, without actually being said by the person in the picture. I have long hair and a beard, so I'm probably not religious. I'm not smiling in my picture, so I must not be fun to be around. The thing is that they're not saying this. Instead, we're projecting our suppositions onto this person's character based on what our society has deemed attractive. Is that fair?