What 4,500 Blind Dates Reveal About Video Calls vs. Meeting in Person

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The downgrade that isn't

Ask anyone who's used a dating app whether they'd rather meet a match in person or over video, and you'll get an eye-roll. Video dates are the thing you settle for: the socially-distanced compromise, the "let's hop on a call first" screening step before the real date. Nobody plans a Zoom date the way they plan dinner.

A new study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2026 asked whether that assumption actually holds up, and the answer is a pretty firm no.

What the researchers did

Elina Moreno of UC Davis, along with Eli Finkel, Kellie Ammerman, and Paul Eastwick, ran the comparison in two parts. First, they asked 161 people to imagine going on a blind date, one in person and one over Zoom, and predict how each would go. People expected the in-person date to run nearly twice as long (86 minutes, versus 49 for the video version) and to beat the video date on almost everything: how attracted they'd feel, how competent and trustworthy their date would seem, whether they'd want a second one.

Then came the real test. The researchers pulled records from a US matchmaking service that had set up 4,542 actual blind dates between October 2023 and January 2024, some in person, some over video, with both people in each pair reporting back afterward on how it went.

The reality check

The gap people predicted mostly didn't show up. Daters rated their video-call partners about as attractive, ambitious, and confident as their in-person ones, and connection scores landed in a similar range across formats. The one place format did matter was time: in-person dates ran roughly an hour longer than video ones on average, matching people's instinct that meeting up takes more of an evening. But length isn't the same as quality, and once you looked past the clock, the two kinds of date produced strikingly similar impressions of the other person. What predicted whether a date went well had much more to do with the compatibility between the two people than with whether they were in the same room.

That's a real gap between prediction and outcome, not proof that setting is irrelevant. This was one matchmaking service's client base over a few months, so it's worth being cautious about generalizing to every dating context, and self-reported ratings from participants who knew which format they'd used aren't the same as, say, a follow-up check on relationship outcomes months later. Still, for a question people have strong gut opinions about, actual comparative data is rare, and the direction of the finding is clear enough to take seriously.

Why the misjudgment happens

The researchers point to a familiar bias: it's easier to picture what's lost in a video call (the shared meal, the physical presence, the easy hours) than what's preserved. Voice, expressiveness, humor, curiosity and the small back-and-forth that builds attraction all come through reasonably well on a screen. People just don't weight that when they're predicting in advance.

What it's worth doing with this

If you're screening a lot of matches, the finding is a decent argument for a short video call before committing to a full evening out, not as a lesser substitute but as a genuinely comparable first meeting. It costs less time, travel, and risk, and based on this data it won't systematically undersell how the two of you actually click. The part worth keeping is the researchers' actual caveat: format barely moved the needle, but who you were talking to did all the work. No amount of video-call convenience fixes a bad match, and no restaurant fixes a good one into a better one either.

Sources: SPSP: Is Zoom Dating Really as Bad as You Think?, BPS Research Digest, Study page, SAGE Journals