Dating apps could be leading to more interracial marriages

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Ah, Tinder: smashing racial barriers through . . . smashing.

Online dating could be contributing to the rise in interracial marriages, says a new study.

Researchers from the National Academy of Sciences looked at marriage stats spanning from 1967 to 2013, and found that the spikes of interracial dating coincided with the launch of online matchmaking sites and apps like Match.com and OkCupid, reports Mic.

In particular, the study saw a spike in racially diverse nuptials in 2014 — two years after Tinder was founded.

And this could be a positive trend, according to study co-author Josué Ortega, a lecturer in economics at the University of Essex. “We found that online dating corresponds with way more interracial marriages, and way stronger marriages, from a mathematics perspective,” he writes in the paper.

Ortega also teamed up with study co-author Philipp Hergovich, an economics doctoral student at the University of Vienna, to run a mathematical simulation that mimics social interactions between people. Their findings suggest that people who only meet others by traditional means — meaning in person, without internet interference — are likelier to have less diverse social circles than people who participate in online dating.

“Our model predicts nearly complete racial integration upon the emergence of online dating, even if the number of partners that individuals meet from newly formed ties is small,” Ortega and Hergovich write. “Our model also predicts that marriages created in a society with online dating tend to be stronger.”

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