Religious women are more receptive to potential partners on dating apps, study suggests

A recent study suggests that a woman’s level of religious belief influences how she evaluates potential partners on swipe-based dating apps like Tinder. When navigating these platforms, women often face a trade-off between evaluating a potential partner’s genetic fitness and their willingness to invest in a relationship. The findings indicate that more religious women show a broader initial receptivity to men’s profiles, while overall, women tend to prefer softer facial features but surprisingly favor exaggerated, unverifiable profile biographies. The research was published in Psychology & Sexuality.

Swipe-based dating applications require users to make split-second decisions about potential partners based on a single photograph and a brief biography. These platforms compress mate selection into rapid, low-consequence choices, forcing users to rely heavily on highly visible cues. When evaluating a photograph, people often pick up on facial sexual dimorphism, which refers to how physically masculinized or feminized a face appears.

Earlier research discovered that women often prefer softer, feminized male faces over hyper-masculine ones. For instance, a 1998 study showed that women routinely find feminized male faces more attractive than strictly masculine alternatives. This preference exists partly because rugged features are linked to lower trustworthiness, with a 2012 study indicating that women view more masculine men as more likely to engage in unfaithful behavior.

Religious norms often emphasize long-term relational stability and sexual restraint. Supporting this, a study covered by PsyPost in 2017 indicated that higher religious commitment is associated with a greater preference for long-term mating strategies and fewer sexual partners. Because of this association, researchers expected that religious women might be more cautious when evaluating potential partners online.

The new study builds on this concept by examining how initial visual judgments interact with written profile details and a woman’s own religiosity on modern dating apps. The research was conducted by Katherine L. Sheetz, a Ph.D. candidate, and Lisa L. M. Welling, a professor of psychology, both at Oakland University.

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“Online dating has changed the way people make initial judgments about potential partners, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic forced the majority of dating online,” Welling, who directs the Welling Research Lab, told PsyPost. “Swipe-based platforms reduce initial mate choice selections to very rapid decisions based on relatively limited visual and textual information, yet we know relatively little about how individual differences, such as religiosity, shape those early decisions.”

“With this study, we were particularly interested in religiosity because it is associated with sexual restraint, restricted sociosexuality (meaning lower openness to casual sex), and long-term relationship motivations on average,” Welling explained. “We therefore wanted to test whether more religious women would be more selective when evaluating potential male partners in an online context, particularly when profiles contained cues that could be relevant to apparent trustworthiness and relationship intentions.”

The study included 439 single cisgender women between the ages of 18 and 38 who were primarily attracted to men. The participants completed an online survey that began with questionnaires assessing their religious beliefs and their motivations for using dating applications. Afterward, they completed a simulated Tinder task where they viewed 20 distinct male dating profiles. Each profile featured a photograph of a smiling man and a short, 500-character biography.

The researchers manipulated the photographs using computer software so that the faces appeared either 50 percent more masculinized or 50 percent more feminized, while keeping skin tone and identity the same. The profile biographies were also written to be either trustworthy or untrustworthy.

Trustworthy biographies included verifiable, specific information regarding education or employment and avoided grand claims. Untrustworthy biographies featured exaggerated personal achievements and vague job descriptions, a tactic known as selective self-presentation. The participants had to either accept each profile, mimicking a right swipe, or reject the profile, mimicking a left swipe.

The researchers found that facial features strongly guided the women’s choices. Profiles featuring masculinized faces had approximately 56 percent lower odds of being accepted compared to profiles with feminized faces. However, the biographic text yielded unexpected results. Instead of favoring honest profiles, women showed a preference for the exaggerated text. Profiles with untrustworthy biographies had about 24 percent higher odds of acceptance compared to those with straightforward, trustworthy biographies.

“We were also surprised that profiles containing our ‘untrustworthy’ biographies were accepted more often than profiles containing the ‘trustworthy’ biographies,” Welling said. “The manipulation successfully changed perceptions of trustworthiness in the intended direction, so the finding suggests that participants may have been responding to other characteristics conveyed by those biographies, rather than simply preferring less trustworthy partners. We think it might have been something like perceived confidence in the untrustworthy bios because they tended to be more boastful.”

A woman’s level of religious belief also played a role in her swiping behavior, but not in the direction the researchers originally predicted. Higher religiosity predicted higher overall profile acceptance across the board. For each one-unit increase on the study’s seven-point religiosity scale, the odds of a profile being accepted increased by roughly 38 percent.

“The main takeaway is that religiosity was associated with greater initial receptivity to potential partners in our simulated online-dating task, rather than greater selectivity, which is the opposite of what we originally predicted,” Welling noted.

She cautioned that while the association was statistically reliable, it was not necessarily a massive shift in real-world behavior. “An odds ratio is not the same thing as saying that someone was 30% or 38% more likely to date someone,” Welling clarified. “The outcome in our study was simply whether a participant accepted a profile in a controlled, simulated swiping task. In other words, our findings suggest that religious women are more likely to be open to dating men with a greater range of characteristics, but not that they necessarily would accept more men after that initial swipe.”

In exploratory analyses, the researchers looked at why the women used dating apps in the first place. Women who used the apps with the goal of finding a relationship accepted fewer profiles overall, showing a 38 percent reduction in acceptance odds for each one-unit increase in relational motivation. Entertainment or exploratory motives for using the app had no statistical effect on acceptance rates.

The preference for exaggerated biographies is in tension with research covered by PsyPost in 2016, which found that dating profiles featuring heavy bragging reduced viewers’ intentions to contact the owner. This difference might be explained by how the new study was designed, as the simulated Tinder task measured immediate profile acceptance during rapid swiping rather than a deliberate intention to date the profile owner.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The simulated paradigm was not a fully interactive dating application, meaning real-world swiping behavior might differ. The acceptance of a profile in this specific task might reflect a general openness to new experiences or basic social interaction, rather than true romantic intent.

“The biggest caveat is that accepting a dating profile is not the same thing as choosing a partner, having sex with someone, entering a relationship, or taking a real-world interpersonal risk,” Welling emphasized. “Our measure captured an early-stage decision about whether a profile was sufficiently appealing to remain in consideration for potential further contact.”

She also warned against misinterpreting the biography finding as evidence that women prefer dishonest men. “Our biographies combined different aspects of self-presentation, including the extent to which information could theoretically be externally verified and the degree of selective self-presentation,” Welling explained. “Although they produced the intended differences in perceived trustworthiness, they may also have conveyed other characteristics, such as confidence… or like social status, that then influenced profile acceptance.”

The religiosity measure used in the study combined social elements, like attending religious services, with intrinsic elements, like personal beliefs. Social religiosity is often linked to higher interpersonal trust, which might explain the unexpectedly high acceptance rates among religious women. The study sample was also limited to young college-aged women in the United States, meaning the results might not automatically apply to other demographics.

Future research could use eye-tracking technology to see exactly which parts of a dating profile women pay the most attention to. Researchers might also separate different types of religious belief to better understand how they affect romantic risk-taking online. This would provide a better picture of how individuals navigate trust and uncertainty in the digital dating world.

“A major next step is to make the dating environment more realistic and to see how these findings translate into the in-person dating world,” Welling told PsyPost. “Our task captured the rapid decision-making aspect of swipe-based dating similar to dating apps like Tinder, but it was still a controlled simulation and results from face-to-face dating may differ.”

“I think the broader point is that online dating is an interesting setting for studying human decision-making because it makes the initial stages of mate evaluation unusually visible,” Welling concluded. “People are making rapid judgments from photographs, short biographies, and other limited cues, and those judgments reflect both characteristics of the profile and characteristics of the person doing the judging. Our findings suggest that we should be cautious about assuming that a characteristic associated with one aspect of mating psychology will necessarily predict behavior in another context.”

The study, “Holy swipes: the influence of religiosity on mate choice in online dating,” was authored by Katherine L. Sheetz and Lisa L. M. Welling.