Posted June 11, Reviewed by Lybi Ma. Since its launch in , the dating app, Tinder, has received quite a bit of publicity. It's one of the most popular lifestyle apps with over 10 million daily active users. For the uninitiated, Tinder is a mobile dating app that allows users to locate other singles in their geographic area. Users fill out a brief bio and upload photos. They can then start viewing photos of other users who match their age, gender , and location criteria.
They are then notified of any matches, where both people swiped right on each other's profiles. In the popular media , Tinder very much has the reputation of being a "hookup" app, designed to facilitate fleeting sexual encounters. At the peak of the Tinder hype, an article in Vanity Fair announced that Tinder represented the " dawn of the dating apocalypse.
A recently published study by Leah LeFebvre surveyed young adults ages 18 to 34 who said they had used Tinder. The researchers then coded participants' responses into categories. So what was the most commonly cited reason for using Tinder? It's popular: Only about 5 percent of those surveyed indicated that the desire for hookups was their main motivation for joining the site.
This data is summarized in the table below. The participants were also asked what was the purpose of Tinder. While this open-ended data is valuable, it doesn't provide the whole story on why people use Tinder. Participants in LeFebvre's study were asked what their main reason was for using the app, but people often have multiple motivations for their behaviors.
Someone might primarily have joined Tinder because it seemed like the cool thing to do, but that person might also have a desire to meet a potential romantic partner or hookup. In another recent study, by Sindy Sumter and colleagues, a sample of Dutch Tinder users rated the extent to which various motives described their reasons for using Tinder.
