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Every social platform, dating app, and personality quiz starts with the same assumption: if we can figure out who you are, we can match you with someone compatible.
There's just one problem. Decades of research say this assumption is wrong.
Joel, Eastwick, and Finkel's landmark 2017 study fed a machine learning model over 100 personality measures — the kind of data dating apps live on — and tried to predict romantic chemistry between two specific people.[1] The model barely beat chance. Their follow-up study across 11,000+ couples found that similarity in personality traits had "negligible predictive power," explaining less than 0.5% of relationship satisfaction.[2]
Half a percent. That's what decades of trait-matching algorithms have been built on.
The problem isn't the data. It's the question. "Who are you?" is the wrong starting point. The better question — the one the science actually supports — is: How do you see the world?
David Brooks writes that every person is "a point of view, actively constructing their perception of reality from a lifetime of experiences."[3] Two people walk into the same party and literally see different rooms. An optimist and a pessimist read the same ambiguous text message and construct entirely different stories about what the sender meant.
This isn't preference. It's perception. And it runs deeper than any trait.
Neuroscientist Anil Seth describes perception as "controlled hallucination" — the brain sends out predictions of what it expects to encounter, then the senses confirm or correct. Dennis Proffitt's research at the University of Virginia showed that physically fit people estimate hills as less steep, people wearing heavy backpacks perceive distances as longer, and people who've listened to sad music see inclines as steeper.[3] We don't see the world with our eyes. We see it with our entire life.
This principle scales from physical perception to social reality. When your friend cancels plans with a vague text, do you assume they're overwhelmed and need space? Or that they don't value your time? When a colleague takes credit for shared work, do you see insecurity or ambition? These aren't random reactions. They're the output of your meaning-making architecture — a deep cognitive-emotional system shaped by attachment history, cultural inheritance, and every experience you've accumulated.
The critical insight for connection: when two people interpret the same ambiguous moment similarly, something powerful happens.
Maya Rossignac-Milon's research on shared reality provides the clearest scientific answer to what actually predicts connection between two specific people.[4]
Across multiple studies, her team demonstrated that when two people experience convergence in how they interpret ambiguous situations — a photograph, a social scenario, an unclear text — they feel a powerful sense of connection that is distinct from intimacy, social support, or general relationship satisfaction. In speed-dating studies, pairs who constructed similar meanings from the same ambiguous stimulus were significantly more likely to want a second date.
This is interpretive convergence. Not "do you like the same music?" but "do you read the same ambiguous moment and arrive at a similar meaning?" It predicts attraction more reliably than any personality questionnaire ever tested.
The implication is striking. Traditional matching asks: "Are these two people similar?" Shared reality asks: "Do these two people construct similar meanings from the same ambiguous situation?" The first question has negligible predictive power. The second predicts the thing everyone actually cares about — whether two people will feel genuinely connected when they're together.
Dan McAdams' research on narrative identity shows that the stories people tell about ambiguous or difficult experiences fall on a spectrum.[5] Some people construct redemptive narratives — suffering leads to growth, setbacks become turning points. Others construct contamination narratives — good things become tainted, positive experiences are undermined by what follows. This tendency is stable, measurable, and linked to well-being and prosocial behaviour.
David McClelland's work on implicit motives adds another layer.[6] When people interpret ambiguous social scenes, their narratives reveal unconscious drives — for achievement, affiliation, or influence — that predict long-term life outcomes better than self-reported personality traits. What's remarkable is that these implicit motives diverge significantly from what people say they want. You might describe yourself as easy-going and relationship-focused, but when you interpret an ambiguous scenario, your narrative reveals a deep drive toward mastery and accomplishment. The implicit signal is more honest than the explicit one.
Kenneth Dodge's research on attribution style shows that when people encounter ambiguous social provocations — someone cutting in line, a partner sighing during conversation — their interpretation reveals deep personality architecture that is stable across time and directly linked to relationship outcomes.[7]
Put these together and you have a multi-dimensional portrait of how someone constructs reality: their attribution tendencies, their narrative arc, their implicit motives, their relationship beliefs, their interpretive complexity. This is what Nalya measures through scenarios — not who you say you are, but how you actually see.
Nalya builds your Vibe — a multi-dimensional identity profile made up of two independent dimensions that together create 42 unique combinations.
After analysing patterns across the psychological dimensions above, Nalya identifies your Inner Compass — six ways of processing and interpreting the world:
The Illuminator — Seeks clarity in ambiguity. Needs to understand what things mean before moving forward.
The Bridge Builder — Connects what others can't. Needs to understand how everyone's feeling.
The Explorer — Questions that open worlds. Needs to ask the question no one's asking.
The Anchor — Steady in the storm. Needs to find what's solid.
The Catalyst — Turns insight into action. Needs to know what to do with this.
The Weaver — Finds the pattern in the chaos. Needs to see how things connect.
Your Inner Compass emerges from how you actually respond to ambiguous scenarios — a friend's vague cancellation text, a partner's unexplained sigh, a colleague's surprising reaction. After 10–15 Quick Read scenarios, patterns crystallise across attribution style, relationship beliefs, narrative tendency, implicit motives, and interpretive complexity.
The second dimension of your Vibe reveals the motivational drive that pulls you forward — what you're seeking in life and relationships:
Truth Seeker — Drawn to depth and clarity. Harmony Seeker — Drawn to balance and peace. Experience Seeker — Drawn to the new and vivid. Mastery Seeker — Drawn to excellence. Impact Seeker — Drawn to making a dent. Belonging Seeker — Drawn to tribe and home. Freedom Seeker — Drawn to doing it their way.
Your Seeker Type builds from Deep Values assessments, browse behavior patterns, and what captures your attention over time.
Two people can share the same Inner Compass — they both see the world through the same interpretive lens — but be drawn toward completely different things. An Illuminator who's a Truth Seeker has a very different energy from an Illuminator who's a Belonging Seeker, even though both process ambiguity the same way. The combination creates a nuanced compatibility signal that single-dimension systems miss.
Explore all Inner Compass types and Seeker Types →
As you work through scenarios, you're not alone. Lumi is Nalya's AI guide — warm, perceptive, and genuinely curious about your story. Lumi doesn't ask you to rate yourself on a scale. Instead, Lumi helps you notice patterns in your own interpretations — the assumptions you didn't know you were making, the narrative tendencies that shape how you experience every relationship.
Lumi uses three conversational techniques drawn from David Brooks' research on truly knowing another person: narrative elicitation (asking "how did you come to see it that way?" rather than "what do you think?"), embodied specificity (pulling for sensory detail that reveals how you experienced a moment, not just what you thought about it), and looping (reflecting back what you've shared to deepen understanding).
The result is that your Vibe sharpens every time you engage — and every insight Lumi surfaces is something genuinely useful about how you navigate the world, not marketing disguised as self-knowledge.
In Find Your People, we described how Nalya uses values-based discovery to surface people worth meeting — an intentional alternative to algorithmic feeds optimised for time-on-site. Values tell you what someone cares about. That matters.
But your Inner Compass tells you something values can't: how someone interprets the moments that don't have clear answers. Two people can share identical values — both prioritise honesty, growth, and family — and still experience persistent friction because they construct fundamentally different meanings from the same ambiguous moments. One sees a partner's silence as space for reflection; the other reads it as withdrawal. One interprets a cancelled plan as flexibility; the other as disrespect.
Your Vibe — the combination of Inner Compass and Seeker Type — sits beneath values. It's the interpretive and motivational operating system that determines how values actually play out in the messy, ambiguous reality of real relationships. When Nalya combines your values profile with your Vibe dimensions, the result is a compatibility signal built on what the research says actually matters: not trait similarity, but shared reality — two people who construct similar meanings from the same uncertain world and are drawn toward the same things.
Discover your Vibe. Fifteen Quick Read scenarios, each taking about 15 seconds, reveal your Inner Compass — how you make sense of reality. As you continue exploring, your Seeker Type emerges too, completing the full picture of who you are and what you're drawn toward. No account required to start.
See all Inner Compass types and Seeker Types →
Discover your Vibe
Your Vibe isn't based on what you say you are — it's based on how you actually interpret ambiguous situations and what drives you forward. 15 Quick Read scenarios reveal your Inner Compass — the lens through which you construct meaning.
Free · Takes 5 minutes · No account required to start