The theory says you quietly rate yourself, quietly rate everyone else, and go for someone on roughly your own level. Neat, tidy and slightly depressing. Then somebody checked what people actually do on dating sites, and the theory did not survive.
📚 What you need to know
The matching hypothesis (Walster, 1966) says people tend to choose partners of a similar level of physical attractiveness to themselves.
It is a cognitive process: you assess yourself, you assess others, and you compare.
A partner seen as less attractive may lower your social status; a partner seen as more attractive may raise it.
There is a balancing act — aiming higher risks rejection, aiming lower is safer but may not satisfy.
Repeated rejection damages self-esteem, so over time people adjust towards partners they think are realistically attainable.
The study you need is Taylor et al. (2011) — and it did not support the hypothesis.
The mental arithmetic
Nobody sits down with a calculator, but the theory says something like this happens anyway. You form a rough sense of how attractive you are. You form a rough sense of how attractive someone else is. If the two roughly match, you approach. If they do not, you hesitate.
Underneath it sits a calculation about risk. Approaching someone you think is far above you means a high chance of being turned down. Approaching someone you think is below you is safe, but you may not be happy. Most people, the theory says, drift towards the middle.
Notice this is a claim about what people do, not what they want. Almost everyone would take the highest option if rejection carried no cost.
Keep the two halves of the theory separate in your head. One half is about self-assessment; the other is about risk. Most weak answers only describe the first half and miss why the second half is doing the real work.
Key study: Taylor et al. (2011)
This is the study students find confusing, because it is used as the main evidence and it does not support the theory. That is not a problem — it is the point.
Part of the study
What happened
Aim
To test the matching hypothesis using real online dating behaviour rather than a laboratory task.
Participants
60 heterosexual male and 60 heterosexual female profiles chosen at random from an online dating site. All were identified as ‘initiators’ — people who made first contact with other users.
Procedure
Researchers tracked the initiators’ real online activity, recording who replied (reciprocating contacts) and who did not (non-reciprocating contacts). Up to six photographs were collected for each initiator and each of their contacts, giving 966 photographs in total (527 female, 439 male). Independent raters, blind to the purpose, scored every photograph on a 7-point attractiveness scale from −3 to +3.
Results
The findings did not support the matching hypothesis. An initiator’s own attractiveness showed no correlation with the mean attractiveness of the people they contacted. Instead, initiators consistently approached people rated as more attractive than themselves.
Conclusion
The matching hypothesis cannot fully explain real-life attraction and partner choice, at least in online dating.
Where cognitive dissonance comes in. The initiators were holding two contradictory ideas at once: I am less attractive than they are, and I am approaching them anyway. The theory says that gap should stop people. In practice it did not.
Evaluating the theory
What is strong about it
Couples of roughly equal attractiveness plainly do exist. That is anecdotal evidence, but it is why the idea felt plausible in the first place.
The theory takes seriously the idea that cognitions shape partner choice, which fits how humans actually make decisions — by weighing things up rather than reacting on instinct.
It generates testable predictions, which is more than many theories of attraction manage.
What is weaker about it
Taylor’s sample was small, so the data lack robustness and the findings are less reliable than they look.
The theory is simplistic and reductionist. It squeezes something as complicated as human attraction into a single sum — I am a five, so I look for a five.
Online dating is a specific context. Messaging costs nothing and rejection is invisible, so people may aim far higher than they would face to face. The study might be testing the setting rather than the theory.
It says nothing about personality, humour, shared interests or kindness, all of which affect who people end up with.
Link to concepts
Causality: what counts as attractive is highly subjective and varies between people and cultures, so the theory lacks scientific validity. Attraction does not test easily by experiment and is probably better suited to qualitative research.
Responsibility: research that rates people’s appearance needs handling with care. If participants learn how they were scored, and the score is lower than they expected, that could cause real embarrassment or distress. Anonymity matters too — the researchers had to make sure no dating-site photograph could be published or traced back.
EXAM PRACTICE
Evaluate the matching hypothesis as an explanation of attraction. [22]
Step 1: state the hypothesis
Walster (1966): people choose partners of similar physical attractiveness to themselves, via self-assessment and comparison.
Step 2: explain the mechanism
A balancing act. Aiming higher risks rejection; repeated rejection damages self-esteem; expectations settle at what feels attainable.
Step 3: the evidence
Taylor et al. (2011). 120 profiles, 966 photographs, blind raters on a 7-point scale.
Step 4: the result and what it meansNo correlation between an initiator’s attractiveness and that of their contacts — and they consistently aimed higher. The evidence contradicts the theory.
Step 5: weigh it up
Small sample weakens Taylor; but the theory itself is reductionist, ignores non-physical factors, and rests on a subjective variable.
Theory + mechanism + contradicting evidence + evaluation of bothSay clearly that the study fails to support the theory. Pretending it supports it costs marks.
💡 Exam tip
State up front that Taylor et al. did not support the hypothesis. Examiners are watching for this.
Quote the 966 photographs and the −3 to +3 scale. Two precise details are enough.
‘Blind raters’ is a strength worth naming — they did not know who had contacted whom.
Bring in the online context as a limitation. It is a sharp point and few students make it.
The subjectivity of attractiveness is your best theoretical criticism.
⚠ Common mix-up
Saying Taylor supported the theory. The opposite. Initiators aimed above their own rating.
Confusing the matching hypothesis with ‘opposites attract’. This theory is about similarity.
Treating it as being about personality. As stated, it concerns physical attractiveness only.
Saying the profiles were the participants’ own choices. The 120 profiles were selected at random by the researchers.
Getting the scale wrong. It ran from −3 to +3, which is seven points, not a scale out of 10.
Up next: Self-Disclosure and Growing Closer — what actually turns two people who fancy each other into two people in a relationship.
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