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Online dating sites frequently claim that they have fundamentally altered the dating landscape for the better. This article employs psychological science to examine (a) whether online dating is fundamentally different from conventional offline dating and (b) whether online dating promotes better romantic outcomes than conventional offline dating. The answer to the first question (uniqueness) is yes, and the answer to the second question (superiority) is yes and no. To understand how online dating fundamentally differs from conventional offline dating and the circumstances under which online dating promotes better romantic outcomes than conventional offline dating, we consider the three major services online dating sites offer: access, communication, and matching. Access refers to users' exposure to and opportunity to evaluate potential romantic partners they are otherwise unlikely to encounter. Communication refers to users' opportunity to use various forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to interact with specific potential partners through the dating site before meeting face-to-face. Matching refers to a site's use of a mathematical algorithm to select potential partners for users. Regarding the uniqueness question, the ways in which online dating sites implement these three services have indeed fundamentally altered the dating landscape. In particular, online dating, which has rapidly become a pervasive means of seeking potential partners, has altered both the romantic acquaintance process and the compatibility matching process. For example, rather than meeting potential partners, getting a snapshot impression of how well one interacts with them, and then slowly learning various facts about them, online dating typically involves learning a broad range of facts about potential partners before deciding whether one wants to meet them in person. Rather than relying on the intuition of village elders, family members, or friends or to select which pairs of unacquainted singles will be especially compatible, certain forms of online dating involve placing one's romantic fate in the hands of a mathematical matching algorithm. Turning to the superiority question, online dating has important advantages over conventional offline dating. For example, it offers unprecedented (and remarkably convenient) levels of access to potential partners, which is especially helpful for singles who might otherwise lack such access. It also allows online daters to use CMC to garner an initial sense of their compatibility with potential partners before deciding whether to meet them face-to-face. In addition, certain dating sites may be able to collect data that allow them to banish from the dating pool people who are likely to be poor relationship partners in general. On the other hand, the ways online dating sites typically implement the services of access, communication, and matching do not always improve romantic outcomes; indeed, they sometimes undermine such outcomes. Regarding access, encountering potential partners via online dating profiles reduces three-dimensional people to two-dimensional displays of information, and these displays fail to capture those experiential aspects of social interaction that are essential to evaluating one's compatibility with potential partners. In addition, the ready access to a large pool of potential partners can elicit an evaluative, assessment-oriented mindset that leads online daters to objectify potential partners and might even undermine their willingness to commit to one of them. It can also cause people to make lazy, ill-advised decisions when selecting among the large array of potential partners. Regarding communication, although online daters can benefit from having short-term CMC with potential partners before meeting them face-to-face, longer periods of CMC prior to a face-to-face meeting may actually hurt people's romantic prospects. In particular, people tend to overinterpret the social cues available in CMC, and if CMC proceeds unabated without a face-to-face reality check, subsequent face-to-face meetings can produce unpleasant expectancy violations. As CMC lacks the experiential richness of a face-to-face encounter, some important information about potential partners is impossible to glean from CMC alone; most users will want to meet a potential partner in person to integrate their CMC and face-to-face impressions into a coherent whole before pursuing a romantic relationship. Regarding matching, no compelling evidence supports matching sites' claims that mathematical algorithms work—that they foster romantic outcomes that are superior to those fostered by other means of pairing partners. Part of the problem is that matching sites build their mathematical algorithms around principles—typically similarity but also complementarity—that are much less important to relationship well-being than has long been assumed. In addition, these sites are in a poor position to know how the two partners will grow and mature over time, what life circumstances they will confront and coping responses they will exhibit in the future, and how the dynamics of their interaction will ultimately promote or undermine romantic attraction and long-term relationship well-being. As such, it is unlikely that any matching algorithm that seeks to match two people based on information available before they are aware of each other can account for more than a very small proportion of the variance in long-term romantic outcomes, such as relationship satisfaction and stability. In short, online dating has radically altered the dating landscape since its inception 15 to 20 years ago. Some of the changes have improved romantic outcomes, but many have not. We conclude by (a) discussing the implications of online dating for how people think about romantic relationships and for homogamy (similarity of partners) in marriage and (b) offering recommendations for policymakers and for singles seeking to make the most out of their online dating endeavors.

Power in non-romantic contexts makes people confident in their ability to attract potential partners, increasing their mating motivation and the likelihood of acting on this motivation. Four studies investigated whether perceptions of power within romantic relationships would also activate mating goals, intensifying desires for alternative partners. In Studies 1 and 2, participants underwent power manipulation and then described a sexual fantasy or evaluated photos of attractive strangers. Studies 3 and 4 used face-to-face interaction and daily experiences methods to examine the mechanisms underlying the link between power and extradyadic desires. Overall, high perceived relationship power was associated with increased interest in alternatives. Perceived relative mate value explained this association, suggesting that what determines whether power elicits extradyadic interest is not power perceptions alone but rather the feeling of having a higher mate value than one’s partner that accompanies elevated power and affects whether high-power individuals will prioritize their own needs in ways that may hurt their partners.

When principals listen to their teachers, they may foster an open and receptive work environment that helps teachers adapt during stressful times. Two studies examined the role of perceived principals’ listening to teachers on workplace outcomes. Study 1 ( N  = 218) was conducted during the first nationwide lockdown in Israel. Study 2 ( N  = 247) was conducted during a later lockdown and controlled for social support to test the independent effects of the two distinct interpersonal experiences. Findings supported our hypothesis that principals’ listening would relate to lower teacher turnover intention. In addition, in line with our hypothesis, teachers high on perceived stress generally reported higher turnover intentions. However, the detrimental effect of perceived stress was not observed when teachers evaluated their principals as good listeners. Finally, we anticipated and found that principal listening is associated with organizational citizenship behavior. Specifically, teachers were more likely to help one another when feeling listened to by their principals.

Employees who perceive their supervisors to listen well enjoy multiple benefits, including enhanced well-being. However, concerns regarding the construct validity of perceived-listening measures raise doubts about such conclusions. The perception of listening quality may reflect two factors: constructive and destructive listening, which may converge with desired (e.g., humility) and undesired (e.g., rudeness) supervisor-subordinate relationship behaviors, respectively, and both may converge with relationship quality (e.g., trust). Therefore, we assessed the convergent validity of four perceived listening measures and their divergent validity with eight measures of supervisor-subordinate relationship behaviors, eight relationship-quality measures, and a criterion measure of well-being. Using data from 2,038 subordinates, we calculated the disattenuated correlations and profile similarities among these measures. The results supported convergent but not divergent validity: 58.7% (12.6%) of the correlations expected to diverge had confidence intervals with upper limits above 0.80 (0.90), and 20% of their profile-similarity indices were close to 1. To probe these correlations, we ran a factor analysis revealing good and poor relationship factors and an exploratory graph analysis identifying three clusters: positive and negative relationship behaviors and relationship quality. A post-hoc analysis indicated that relationship-quality mediates the effect of the positive and negative behaviors on well-being. The results demonstrate the challenge of differentiating the perception of listening from commonly used supervisor-subordinate relationship constructs, and cast doubts on the divergent validity of many constructs of interest in Organizational Behavior. However, using the “sibling” constructs framework may allow disentangling these highly correlated relationship constructs, conceptually and empirically.

Past research reliably shows that spending money on others (termed prosocial spending) makes people happier than spending money on oneself. The present research tested whether the happiness benefits of prosocial spending may be reduced when spending money on others for self-centered reasons—to benefit the self—than when done for recipient-centered reasons—to benefit the recipient. Four specific spending motives—spending on others to self-enhance, out of obligation, to enhance recipients, and to support recipients—were derived empirically and tested for their unique effects on hedonic and eudaemonic well-being. Across four studies, recipient-enhancement, a recipient-centered motive with a positive effect on well-being, and obligation, a self-centered motive with a negative effect on well-being, emerged as the most reliable motivational predictors of well-being from prosocial spending, across hedonic and eudaemonic forms. These findings offer the first evidence of specific interpersonal motives on prosocial spending behaviors and their effects on levels of rewards in addition to kinds of rewards.

Suppression is one of the most commonly studied emotion-regulation strategies and a variety of studies have shown that suppression of emotions is associated with adverse affective outcomes. Most of the evidence for this conclusion comes from laboratory manipulations in which people enact experimentally induced suppression or from survey-based recollections. In the present pair of studies (468 participants total), we used real-time experience sampling data to examine the effect of naturally occurring suppression of negative emotion at one moment on subsequent reports of both negative and positive emotion. Results demonstrated that suppression led to later increases in both high-activation and low-activation negative emotions, over and above the level of negative emotion being suppressed. These findings add ecologically valid support to the growing body of evidence showing that emotional suppression is not only an ineffective emotion-regulation strategy, but also a costly one.