The question.
You open a profile and see a few photos and a few lines of text. Within seconds you feel you know something about this person. Maybe they seem kind, or funny, or a little too good to be true. The question is simple, and it matters more than most people admit: how much of that feeling is real? When you date across countries, a profile is often all you have for weeks. There is no friend in common to ask and no chance meeting in a cafe. So it is worth asking what the research says about what a profile can show, what it hides, and how our own eyes fool us. Most of us also believe we are good judges of people. The evidence below suggests we are less accurate than we feel, especially when all we have is a screen.
This article looks at studies from psychology and communication research. Some look at the person writing the profile. Others look at the person reading it. Together they give a clearer picture than any single study can. They also point to a few habits that make a profile far more useful, and a few signs that should make you slow down.
A profile shows the person they choose to show.
A 2025 study asked real online daters for their profiles and also for a description of how they wanted to come across.1 The 180 daters were aged 18 to 30.1 They lived in Canada or the United States.1 A separate group of 196 people then read the profiles and rated each person's personality.1 This design lets researchers compare three things: who people say they are, who they want to seem, and who strangers think they are.
The researchers expected profiles to be a place where people are tempted to bend the truth about themselves.1 What they found was that people wanted to be seen both accurately and in a good light, and they managed to present the persona they wanted without their real personality showing through.1 Read that carefully, because it cuts both ways. It does not say people lie. It says a profile mostly shows what the writer chooses to show. If someone wants to be seen clearly, they can be. If someone wants to hide a side of themselves, a profile gives them room to do it.
The profiles in that study were also short, with an average of 3.46 photos and 29.16 words.1 That is very little to go on. Most of what a reader feels about a stranger is built from those few pieces, plus their own guesses. The same study found that some of these patterns were linked to real choices, such as whether a judge chose to like a profile, and to traits of the people involved, such as their attachment style.1 In plain words, a small profile still shapes big decisions.
Words matter too, and a 2022 study looked at what makes profile text work.2 Its readers were mostly members of a dating website for people over 50, where the written part of a profile matters a lot.2 Texts that felt original made readers see the writer as more intelligent and funnier, and that raised both attraction and the wish to date them.2 Texts felt original when they used fresh language, such as a metaphor, and when they shared more concrete details about the person.2 The authors describe good originality as a balance between being new and still fitting the setting.2
A study of 716 Swedish and Nordic profiles on a dating site for non-heterosexual men and women found that people built their profiles around a few themes.3 Those themes were mind versus body, desire and longing, and personal limits, and gender often marked the line between how people presented themselves.3 The lesson is not about one community. It is that profiles follow unwritten rules of their setting. Readers learn those rules too, and judge by them.
Your eyes decide before you do.
The second half of the story is about the reader. In one set of experiments, people learned new faces so they could recognise them later, from photos that made each person look more or less attractive.4 When they were later asked to rate a different, middle photo of each person, their ratings were pulled toward the first photos they had seen, even though they were told to rate only the photo in front of them.4 The authors conclude that forming an impression of attractiveness from a face happens whether we want it to or not.4 So the first photo in a profile does more than you think. It colours how you see every photo after it.
A study in Sydney copied the yes or no choice that many dating apps use, and asked people to judge a stream of faces one at a time.5 People were more likely to call a face attractive if the face just before it had also seemed attractive.5 This study was small: 32 female psychology students at the University of Sydney.5 Even so, the idea is worth holding on to. Your judgment of one person can depend on who you happened to see a moment before.
Photos can also lead us to feel sure about things a photo cannot show.6 In that US survey experiment, people were paid for right answers and felt confident, yet they did no better than chance at picking out the person with a hidden health condition.6 They also tended to link good looks with more risk, the opposite of what the researchers expected.6 The point is not about health. It is about confidence. Feeling sure about a stranger from a photo is not the same as being right.
A newer worry is that the face in a profile might not be a real photo at all. A 2025 study built digital copies of real people's faces from detailed 3D scans.7 When people could put a copy and a real photo side by side, they could tell them apart well.7 When they saw each face alone, they were much worse at it, and many did not notice that copies were there at all.7 The copies also led people to the same first judgments about attractiveness, dominance and trustworthiness as real photos did.7 The first of these experiments recruited 52 paid online participants.7
Where the evidence runs out.
These studies are useful, but they have clear limits. Most were small, and each looked at one kind of person in one place. The Sydney study used a few dozen young women, all psychology students. The profile study used young adults in North America. The study on profile text drew mostly on people over 50 on one dating website. We cannot assume the same patterns hold in Lagos, Manila or Mumbai without studies there.
Culture adds another layer. What counts as modest, confident or honest in a profile differs from place to place. A photo that reads as friendly in one country may read as too casual in another. None of these studies compared readers across cultures, so we do not know how far these first judgments travel. For people dating across borders, that is exactly the gap that matters most.
They also tested short moments in a lab or an online task. Real dating happens over weeks of messages, calls and, sometimes, meeting. A first judgment that is wrong can be corrected later, and none of these studies follow people that far. There is also a tension between the studies. One shows that people can choose to be seen accurately. Others show that readers judge quickly and with too much confidence. Both can be true at once, and the evidence does not tell us which matters more in a real relationship. That is an honest gap, and it is better to name it than to paper over it.
What it adds up to.
Put together, the evidence points to a clear conclusion. A profile is not a window into a person. It is closer to a short letter of introduction, written by someone who decided what to put in it. That is not a bad thing. Most people use that freedom to show a fair picture of who they are. But it means the reader is doing much of the work, and the reader's eyes are not neutral.
Our minds rush to judge faces, are pulled by the last face we saw, and feel certain long before they have reason to. New tools make it harder to know if a photo shows a real person at all. So the useful question is not whether a profile looks right. It is how you can learn more, safely and fairly, before you trust it. The studies suggest three answers: give and look for concrete detail, check that a person is real, and let time and conversation correct your first impression. Those habits work with how the mind behaves, rather than against it. None of this means profiles are useless. It means they work best as the first step of a longer process, not as the final word.
What it means for you.
When you write your own profile, choose your first photo with care, because it sets the tone for the rest. Use your words to share real, specific details, such as what you cooked last weekend or the street you grew up on. Those details help the right person see you clearly. When you read someone else's profile, treat your first feeling as a starting guess, not a fact. Look at a few profiles before you decide, and come back to one later if your first look was rushed. Ask questions that invite detail, and notice whether the answers stay consistent over time.
Hearing a voice and seeing a face move adds a great deal that a still photo cannot. A short video call early on can confirm that the person matches their photos, and it can show warmth, humour and patience in a way text rarely does. On Ember, voice and video calls happen inside the app, so you do not need to share a phone number to take that step. If someone keeps finding reasons to avoid a call for weeks, treat that as information too.
Be especially careful when a new match moves fast toward money. In a large UK panel, researchers compared people who had lost money to romance scams with people who had never been scammed this way.8 The final sample had 11,780 people.8 Of these, 200 had been caught by a romance scam.8 Victims in that study tended to be middle-aged, well-educated women.8 They also scored higher on impulsiveness and on a measure of trustworthiness, and lower on kindness.8 This was one study at one point in time, so it shows a pattern, not a rule.
Reports to the US Federal Trade Commission show the scale of the problem: in 2022, nearly 70,000 people reported a romance scam and reported losses of $1.3 billion.9 The typical reported loss was $4,400.9 A claim to be serving on a faraway military base is the most common excuse scammers use, and working on an offshore oil rig is another.9 The FTC warns that scammers say it is true love but explain that they live far away for work or military service.10 If someone you have never met asks for money, gift cards or help with an investment, stop and talk to someone you trust. In the United States you can report it at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, in the United Kingdom through Action Fraud, and in other countries through your national police or consumer agency.
Checking that a person is real is the strongest protection a profile can offer. On Ember, every member passes a government ID check with a live selfie before they can appear, which answers the question a photo alone cannot. Even then, the rest of the advice holds: let conversation, calls and time show you who someone is. A profile can open the door, but only time together can show you the person behind it.
Sources.
- Sarra Jiwa et al. (2025). Who Did I Swipe On? Accuracy and Self-Presentation in Online Dating. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. doi:10.1177/01461672251386488
- Tess van der Zanden et al. (2022). Originality in online dating profile texts: How does perceived originality affect impression formation and what makes a text original?. PLOS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0274860
- Emelie Louise Miller (2019). Mind, Body and Boundaries: Self-Presentation on the Nordic LGBTQ Online Dating Scene. Frontiers in Psychology. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02770
- Kay L. Ritchie et al. (2017). Forming impressions of facial attractiveness is mandatory. Scientific Reports. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-00526-9
- Jessica Taubert et al. (2016). Love at second sight: Sequential dependence of facial attractiveness in an on-line dating paradigm. Scientific Reports. doi:10.1038/srep22740
- Tamar Krishnamurti et al. (2020). Inferring Sexually Transmitted Infection Risk From Attractiveness in Online Dating Among Adolescents and Young Adults: Exploratory Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research. doi:10.2196/14242
- Kyara C. Nasser Oesterreich et al. (2025). Avatars versus the people: Photo-realism, spontaneous detection and trait inferences of digitised faces. Perception. doi:10.1177/03010066251379016
- Monica T. Whitty (2017). Do You Love Me? Psychological Characteristics of Romance Scam Victims. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. doi:10.1089/cyber.2016.0729
- Federal Trade Commission (2023). Romance scammers’ favorite lies exposed | Federal Trade Commission. Federal Trade Commission.
- Federal Trade Commission (2025). What To Know About Romance Scams | Consumer Advice. Federal Trade Commission.