She’s Not That into You: Speed Dating with a Criminal Record

ABSTRACT

Prosocial relationships are beneficial to post-conviction reintegration, but criminal stigma may limit romantic relationship access. This study implements an experimental audit of speed dating, which allows people to meet several potential partners in a brief time, to explore how conviction disclosure, offense type, and attractiveness and personality ratings affect dating interest. Three women and three men confederates of different races/ethnicities were randomly assigned to a control or one of three offense conditions before interacting one-on-one with 64 participants in 4-minute Zoom Q&A speed dating sessions. Following each interaction, participants rated one another on attractiveness, personality dimensions, and interest in dating. Findings indicate that disclosure of property offense conviction significantly reduced women’s willingness to date men confederates while assault and drug convictions did not negatively affect women’s dating interest. Women confederate disclosures of convictions did not affect men’s interest in dating them. Researching the effects of prior convictions on romantic relationship interest is challenging but important in revealing how criminal stigma varies by offense type to affect relationship capital.

KEYWORDS:

• Speed dating
• criminal history disclosure
• race
• attractiveness
• stigma

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23774657.2023.2190550

Notes

1. We use the term “tester” throughout to refer to members of the research team who posed as participants in the speed dating events. Testers were fully aware of the research procedures.

2. Due to scheduling conflicts, the Latino man was twice replaced by other Latino men. Latino #1 served as tester in session 1. Latino #2 served as tester in sessions 2 and 3. Latino #3 served as tester in sessions 5 and 6. There was no Latino tester in session 4.

3. Despite being similarly scaled, “attraction” was not included in the factor analysis because prior research has noted its significant effect on romantic interest.

4. Participants’ concerns that mentioned criminal history: 1) “Not much, potentially his past with crime” 2) “criminal history” 3) “a lot – he told me about the time he was arrested..”

5. t-test analyses indicated significant differences between the three Latino testers in the following ratings: willingness to date, funniness, likability, intelligence, and sincerity. Regression analyses were re-run with an additional variable to test for the effect of different male Latino testers. This variable was not significant in any of the models.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Fairleigh Dickinson University [Faculty Research Grant]