Tinder's Chief Strategy Officer, Jonathan Badene recently revealed that it's famous swiping format has its roots in a 1948 psychology experiment by Harvard professor Burrhus Frederic [B. F.] Skinner.

For his experiments, Skinner put pigeons into cages with thick buttons, as you can see in this footage from a 1982 documentary called Cognition Creativity and Behavior by Research Press Productions.

Then he randomly dropped in food.

He found that the pigeons developed superstitions, like only pecking one color button or turning in circles that they believe got them food.

The consequences of behavior are as important as the antecedents.

And things happened to an organism after it behaves and have a very important effect on it, and the effect is to make it more likely that the organism behave the same way again.

Of course, the food drops were totally random.

Badene said that this is what inspired Tinder's swiping format.

It's called operant conditioning.

It's the idea that behaviors connected to positive or negative rewards.

Basically, pigeons keep pecking because they think they're going to get food, and humans keep swiping because they get matches, and everybody gets the dopamine rush that comes with it.

In a 2010 study, researchers found that the anticipation of a reward causes more dopamine release than actually getting the reward.

So, every time you swipe, your brain is more and more excited to get that match.

It's called the variable ratio reward system.

It's the same reward system that things like slot machines, video games, and social media all use.

Tinder has proven that this model works.

Tinder boasts 1.6 billion swipes a day and is the most downloaded lifestyle app for two years running.

In 2015, Tinder cut off all regular users at 100 swipes a day and only allowed more if they were subscribed to a premium account that goes for 10 USD or more a month.

Now, 24 percent of users have a premium account.

With a business model that's built based on instinctual behaviors, it's doubtful that this will stop working anytime soon nor would many users want it to.

As Tinder's CSO says, you swipe, you might get a match, you might not, but you're still excited to play the game.

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