Profiles: How Photos and Bios Work Together

Viewing and swiping on profiles is a common feature of most online dating apps, including Revel. Profiles provide an opportunity to make thin slice judgments, which prior work in social psychology suggests can be both accurate and influential when forming first impressions.1,2 But what are people evaluating when they view a profile? What features of the profile are feeding into initial impressions that sway people into swiping left or right?

The profiles on Revel have photos and a bio (i.e., information self-reported by users). It’s no secret that physical attraction is a key element people use to evaluate potential partners.3,4,5 But people infer more than just attractiveness from profile pictures. Research examining social media profile pictures has found that people who smiled or showed more positive emotions in their photo were viewed as having more positive personality traits.6,7 Within an online dating app pool, the most attractive people get pursued by “everyone,” including those less attractive than them.8,9 Thus, the photos dating app users choose to display matter, for the pursuer and the pursued.

Less is known about how bios influence dating decisions, in part because there is so much variability in how people put bios together and what information they choose to display.10 Although some research has shown that photos are more important than bios in decision-making online,10,11 bios still offer a non-negligible amount of information users draw upon to perceive someone’s personality, assess similarity, and infer effort or interest.12 For example, having more typos on one’s bio leads to being perceived as less attractive and intelligent, and subsequently, worse dating outcomes.13

When we designed Revel, we intentionally kept the photos and bio separate. So, when you view a profile, clicking into someone’s photos is different than clicking into their bio. This will allow us to untangle the importance of photos versus bios when evaluating profiles, and gain more clarity into what type of bios (e.g., what specific info, length) do the best. People use different pieces of information to make dating decisions, and we want to know how these pieces affect dating decisions on Revel.

  1. Ambady, N., & Rosenthal, R. (1992). Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 111(2), 256-274
  2. Carney, D. R., Colvin, C. R., & Hall, J. A. (2007). A thin slice perspective on the accuracy of first impressions. Journal of Research in Personality, 41(5), 1054-1072. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2007.01.004
  3. Eastwick, P. W., & Smith, L. K. (2018). Sex-differentiated effects of physical attractiveness on romantic desire: A highly powered, preregistered study in a photograph evaluation context. Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, 3(1), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1080/23743603.2018.1425089
  4. Eastwick, P. W., Eagly, A. H., Finkel, E. J., & Johnson, S. E. (2011). Implicit and explicit preferences for physical attractiveness in a romantic partner: a double dissociation in predictive validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(5), 993-1011. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0024061
  5. Walster, E., Aronson, V., Abrahams, D., & Rottman, L. (1966). Importance of physical attractiveness in dating behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4(5), 508-516. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0021188
  6. Liu, L., Preotiuc-Pietro, D., Samani, Z. R., Moghaddam, M. E., & Ungar, L. (2016). Analyzing personality through social media profile picture choice. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 211-220). https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v10i1.14738
  7. Turner, M., & Hunt, N. (2014, June). What does your profile picture say about you? The accuracy of thin-slice personality judgments from social networking sites made at zero-acquaintance. In International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media (pp. 506-516). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  8. Bruch, E. E., & Newman, M. E. (2018). Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets. Science Advances, 4(8), eaap9815. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aap9815
  9. Hitsch, G. J., Hortaçsu, A., & Ariely, D. (2010). Matching and sorting in online dating. American Economic Review, 100(1), 130-163. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.1.130
  10. Witmer, J., Rosenbusch, H., & Meral, E. O. (2025). The relative importance of looks, height, job, bio, intelligence, and homophily in online dating: A conjoint analysis. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 17, 100579. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2024.100579
  11. Fiore, A. T., Taylor, L. S., Mendelsohn, G. A., & Hearst, M. (2008, April). Assessing attractiveness in online dating profiles. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 797-806). https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357181
  12. Dai, M., & Robbins, R. (2021). Exploring the influences of profile perceptions and different pick-up lines on dating outcomes on tinder: An online experiment. Computers in Human Behavior, 117, 797-806. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106667
  13. Van der Zanden, T., Schouten, A. P., Mos, M. B., & Krahmer, E. J. (2020). Impression formation on online dating sites: Effects of language errors in profile texts on perceptions of profile owners’ attractiveness. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 37(3), 758-778. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407519878787