Feds spent $432,000 to study whether gay hookup apps increase risky sexual behavior

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published 22 January 2015

Do smartphone apps facilitating easy meetups for casual sex with near-strangers increase risky sexual behavior? For most people, the answer might be "probably." For the federal government, though, the answer is, "Let's spend nearly half a million dollars to find out."

An NIH grant of $432,000 awarded to Columbia University funded a study to this effect last year. Researchers interviewed gay men who use hookup apps like Grindr, which use geolocating to help users find potential sexual partners nearby. Unsurprisingly, the study found that these apps do lead users to more — and riskier — hookups.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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