RESEARCH ARTICLE Hook, Line and Sinker: Do Tinder Matches and Meet Ups Lead to One-Night Stands? Trond Viggo Grøntvedt 1,2 & Mons Bendixen 1 & Ernst O. Botnen 1,3 & Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair 1 Received: 6 September 2019 /Revised: 25 October 2019 /Accepted: 29 October 2019 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 Abstract Several recent papers have established a link between personality and Tinder use, particularly with regards to sociosexuality and motivations for use. Following up our recent publication on dating apps and the studies linking Tinder and sociosexuality, we provide a more detailed investigation of the efficiency of using Tinder to acquire one-night stands or meet potential long-term committed relationship partners. Using self-reported data from 269 students (62% women), we find that a very large number of matches are required for a relative small number of meet ups, and result in a very limited number of hook-ups or potential romantic partner meetings. Merely 20% of the Tinder users in the sample have had one-night stands following Tinder use, and the majority of these only had one extra partner. The primary individual difference predictor of achieving casual sex using Tinder is unrestricted sociosexual attitudes, and this also predicts fewer potential romantic partner meetings. Keywords Sociosexuality . Tinder . Casual sex . Committed relationships Tinder is a location-based mobile dating service app. The app has a simple interface where users are shown pictures, name, and age of other users, along with a short text biography. Users swipe either left (do not want to initiate contact or date) or right (want to initiate contact or date) on the screen, and provided both users swipe right they are matched and can begin messag- ing within the app. Tinder has commonly been seen as a sex app in the public discourse, primarily relating the use of the app to casual sex encounters (Sevi et al. 2018). However, Tinder users have been shown to use the app not only for sexual hook-ups but also for initiating relationships (e.g., LeFebvre 2017; Timmermans and Courtois 2018; Timmermans and De Caluwè 2017). One plausible explanation for a finding of dif- ferent motivations and different outcomes of Tinder use could be that initial sexual encounters lead to more committed relationships (as suggested by Timmermans and Courtois 2018). Alternatively, there could be underlying personality dif- ferences and evolved sex differences that influence motivation for using Tinder for short-term mating vs. long-term mating. However, no previous studies have addressed whether Tinder use actually increases the number of one-night stands or if Tinder use is associated with more meetings for committed relationships. Sexual strategies theory (SST) (Buss and Schmitt 1993, 2016) predicts that men and women will apply specific tactics and strategies in different mating contexts and evaluate different aspects of sex and potential partners differently. SST posits two qualitatively different human mating strategies: long-term and short-term. Long-term mating typically encompasses a commit- ted, intimate, and lasting emotional relationship (Buss 1998). Short-term mating on the other hand is characterized more by brief physically motivated sexual encounters (Kennair et al. 2015). From an evolutionary perspective on reproduction, one differs between mating and parenting effort, which to some degree mirrors short-term and long-term mating strategies (Gangestad and Simpson 2000). One-night stands bear costs within the realm of mating effort, including time spent seeking out eligible mates, courting these, displaying or providing re- sources or desirable traits (Buss and Schmitt 2016), and com- peting with other short-term oriented individuals (Schmitt and Buss 1996; Bendixen and Kennair 2015). * Trond Viggo Grøntvedt trond.v.grontvedt@ntnu.no 1 Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway 2 Department of Public Health and Nursing, HUNT Research Center, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7600 Levanger, Norway 3 Lovisenberg Diakonale Hospital, Oslo, Norway Evolutionary Psychological Science https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-019-00222-z