Being the broke college student that I am, I am usually on the hunt for anything and everything that will save me a bit of cash. I recently stumbled across a BuzzFeed video about people attempting to get their Tinder matches to send them pizza that sparked my interest.
For those of you who don't know, Tinder is a social dating app in which the Tinder profiles of people in your area are displayed in a deck-of-cards fashion, and you swipe through them. Swipe right means you like them and swipe left means you don't. If a person you swipe right for also swiped right for you, then you're a match and can begin talking. Sometimes conversation leads to dating. Sometimes it leads to pizza.
So, in the name of science and pizza, I decided to recreate the experiment (because, you know, repetition leads to validity). Here are my findings in formal lab report style.
Purpose.
Match with people on Tinder and get them to buy me a pizza.
Guidelines.
1. No nudes/sexual favors for pizza.
2. No giving the address of my place of residence in light of safety for my roommates and me (give an address of a public area).
3. No meeting said Tinder person in a non-public place to pick up pizza if necessary.
4. Let the Tinder games begin.
Hypothesis.
If Tinder conversation goes well, then I will have a free pizza to devour and enjoy whilst watching Netflix.
Materials.
A smartphone loaded with the Tinder app and the love for food.
Method.
- Open Tinder app, and if not done already, create a bomb profile.
- Swipe right for every person.
- Wait for match to start convo and conveniently sneak in your want for free pizza.
- Match says yes and orders/delivers pizza for researcher.
- Let the free pizza start rolling in.
Data analysis and results.
So, this experiment was a lot harder than expected. First, I had to be kind of a butt and be pretty direct about my intentions with my matches. This consisted of answering the typical “Hey, what’s up?” question and then inserting something along the lines of, How do you feel about sending me a pizza?
Yeah, flirting is not my thing but when it comes to food, there are no boundaries. The results were very varied. The names and faces of matches are covered to keep anonymity.
Some got angry:
Some transferred the conversation to Snapchat (where the pizza journey was not any more successful).
Some wanted to barter.
And some wanted nudes. The biggest regret of this pleasant conversation was not getting a screenshot of this before un-matching with this person. However, you can imagine how that conversation went.
The best one however was the guy who, although would not buy me pizza, was super chill about being a participant in this experiment and even offered advice:
Conclusion
At the end of the day, the lesson learned is that blatantly asking people for food is kind of hard for two reasons: your conscience catches up with you and people are really hard to crack. Yeah, I didn’t get any free pizza, invalidating my hypothesis, but I did make a contribution to the research on getting food from Tinder. I guess from now, I'll just get pizza the old fashioned way: actually paying for it.
