Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back (WRT Online Dating)

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/

by noodle • 17 years ago

61 89 17 years ago

blog.okcupid.com

MarkPNeyer• 17 years ago

These findings don't surprise me at all. I've always been baffled as to why some people insist that Race, Culture, Gender, or Religion have no bearing on anything. The problem is that if you make a statement like "race is a predictor of academic success" you'll get labeled a racist.

Anon842• 17 years ago

The problem is that people confuse correlation with causation. A being a predictor for B does not mean that A causes B, just that A and B tend to occur together.

rsheridan69• 17 years ago

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

(From http://xkcd.com/552/)

dkarl• 17 years ago

if you make a statement like "race is a predictor of academic success" you'll get labeled a racist

Not necessarily. Whoever you're talking to will carefully consider your language, tone, and any prior knowledge of you to figure out whether you're going to use your statement to support or attack their political beliefs, and then call you a racist as appropriate.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

The problem is a vast number of people don't bother with the consideration stage.

(I attribute that to trash media personally; but that is a vague thought I haven't considered it too much)

EDIT: pop psychology. most people are massively influenced by society. Society "on average" would probably judge such a statement as containing racist overtones. Gut jumps in because racism is an issue that we attach strong emotions too (rightly). It takes a strong Head to overcome emotions like that.

kelnos4• 17 years ago

Sure, people like that are deluded. Race, culture, gender, and religion should have no bearing on anything, but in practice, they do.

I'm not sure that a statement like the one you suggest would get you labeled racist, at least not among people who are capable of critical thinking. The fact remains that race is a predictor of academic success. It shouldn't be, but it is. To be a bit more socially sensitive, you might prefix that statement with "unfortunately," but I think that's one of the less-inflammatory things you can say that have a racial bent.

JacobAldridge2• 17 years ago

I'm really enjoying this series of posts.

Did anyone else think this one had a little more interpretative language, though? "sweethearts" "nails in coffins" or "schizophrenia of people’s racial attitudes" all seem to distract from letting the figures speak for themselves, and given the explosive potential in the figures I guess the less editorial comment the better.

Edit - I'd also like to see a brief post that just looks at the zodiac chart. Would be the best place to send every zodiac-preacher I know to 'disprove' so much of what they argue (excepting the Capricorns, because they don't listen to evidence anyway).

rsheridan69• 17 years ago

>Did anyone else think this one had a little more interpretative language, though? "sweethearts" "nails in coffins" or "schizophrenia of people’s racial attitudes" all seem to distract from letting the figures speak for themselves, and given the explosive potential in the figures I guess the less editorial comment the better.

Agreed. I have alternative interpretations. "sweetheart" -> "desperate," "shitty" (used to describe white guys who don't answer) -> "in a position to be choosy." Naturally, the more replies you get, the more picky you'll be.

shiranaihito• 17 years ago

Right. Black women were the "sweethearts", and consistently found to be unfortunate in all of the categories.

It also happens that black women are the only group I don't find attractive.

Does that make me a racist? Especially when black males' answer to "would you strongly prefer to date someone of your own skin color" was a resounding "Hell no"..

By the way, I've got one friend who doesn't like Asian women, and another who only likes Asian women. Go figure.

( I'm a white guy )

aston• 17 years ago

The previous post and this one both show the same Zodiac chart, which demonstrates basically zero correlation between sign and match score: http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/races_and_religions/Match-By-Zodi...

Hard to write a full on article about no correlation.

JacobAldridge2• 17 years ago

Hence "brief post". I think no correlation deserves slightly more than to only be rolled into the more meaty articles as a control group.

kelnos4• 17 years ago

Frankly I kinda like the informal interpretative language. It's more entertaining and less clinical. I don't think these guys see themselves as there to just regurgitate statistics; they're writers, too.

roundsquare2• 17 years ago

Would be the best place to send every zodiac-preacher I know to 'disprove' so much of what they argue

If only. Go back and read some the comments on the last post (on okcupid, not HN). Someone there argues that just using the zodiac chart as shown (which is the sun or moon sign, I forget which) is insufficient. Apparently we need to use more advanced Zodiac sign knowledge to determine compatibility.

In any event, no amount of statistical data will dissuade strong believers.

tlrobinson3• 17 years ago

While this is an interesting analysis, I don't think you should be labeled "racist" if you aren't attracted to people of races other than your own.

mlinsey2• 17 years ago

Agreed. Are all non-bisexuals "sexist"?

Maybe by some strict definition they are, but not in the ordinary sense we use the term, and to expand its definition to include those sorts of preferences might dilute the moral case against racism and sexism.

emmett6• 17 years ago

There's a clear difference between sex and race when it comes to, um, sex. Conflating the two doesn't make much sense in this instance.

kscaldef• 17 years ago

I think there's a classic nature vs. nurture question here. Is there inherently something that causes people to be attracted to people who look like what they see in the mirror; or is it influenced by the media, your peer group, your parents, etc. Personally, I suspect the latter plays a much larger role, but I don't have any solid evidence to back that up.

And, let's face it, there's probably some degree of it just being easier. Your friends and your family are never going to give you any hassle about dating someone of your own race (). You're never going to have to worry about some bigot yelling at you, or worse, walking down the street. Is that sort of calculation racist? Probably a little, although of a mild sort.

In my mind, though, these sorts of mild racisms help to perpetuate the more serious manifestations. They limit interracial interactions; they perpetuate the myth that there actually is significant genetic basis for the concept of race; and they give comfort to racial-purity bigots.

The delicate thing here is to recognize this sort of feeling without beating yourself up about it too much. But, to start, just try to make the transition from thinking "I'm just not attracted to people who aren't the same race as me, and there's nothing wrong with that" to "I'm not attracted to people who aren't the same race as me, and I'm not really sure why that is".

() This probably applies to religion too.

rokhayakebe• 17 years ago

It suspect it is a matter of "social comfort".

In general men can easily be attracted to women of different races. I think it is in their nature to be broad in their selection. Nearly every men I know have or have considered dating outside his race. Most women I talk to can find someone of a different race attractive. But they will not date them.

dusklight2• 17 years ago

Yeah but the article had some other interesting points, like how black females are less desired by every other race, including black males, and how females in some non-white races prefer white males over males of their own race.

psyklic3• 17 years ago

Years ago I thought this as well. However, once I became good friends with people of different races, I started to become attracted to more people of those races as well.

So, I definitely do think that there is some component of "racism" to this, even though it may be subconscious.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

I need to be thankful for the song "The Lakes of Pontchartrain." If it wasn't for the line "handsome young creole girl" I wouldn't have been curious enough to date my present girlfriend, who is African American. We've now been going out for almost 3 years, and I'm happier than I've ever been. I've also discovered a lot about what subconscious racism I've been carrying around in my head.

There is racism. You can't be black and have a conversation with your sons and your brothers in a parking lot. The police will come by and harass you. This despite the fact that my girlfriend's uncle is a wonderful, industrious, upstanding ex-military man. You can be white and do this, though. (This was not some seedy parking lot in a run-down neighborhood in the big city. It happened in a rural town of only 16,000.)

lionhearted3• 17 years ago

This was a comment to the Okcupid post:

> A lot of dating and who a person would consider for relationships is based on social, cultural and economic considerations, and it’s a simple and unfortunate fact that generally speaking whites are at the higher end of the social and economic spectrums.

I just wanted to call that out in case anyone has been taught that way, but not had a chance to think it through clearly. Becoming successful doesn't make the rest of humanity less successful - it makes them more successful.

It's not a "simple and unfortunate fact" that Vietnamese people immigrating to America revolutionized nail salons and made them affordable to almost all women while making themselves wealthy.

It's not a "simple and unfortunate fact" that many of the greatest American scientists of the last 100 years have been Ashkenazi Jewish.

And so on. It's not unfortunate when one group of people is succeeding - it brings up all of the rest of humanity. One group of people succeeding is not unfortunate; others failing is unfortunate and we can work to rectify that, but never feel guilty about succeeding and prospering.

kgrin2• 17 years ago

The "unfortunate" comment seemed to be directed at the relative inequality, not the fact that whites are "succeeding". I think it's pretty tough to make the case that economic and educational inequality in the United States along racial lines is intrinsically a good thing, particularly given the historical context.

Inequality may be the least-bad outcome given the menu of potential remedies ("Harrison Bergeron" and all that), but it's not a great thing in and of itself. Particularly given the historical and occasional modern-day evidence of straight-up racism (see: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DXK/is_9_20/ai_10452... ), I think it's reasonable to at least scrutinize situations of high inequality to figure out whether they are, in fact, just caused by some people working harder or being more lucky or what have you, or whether there are actual problems.

On the merits, though, I think OKCupid's matching algorithm (the questions) theoretically accounts for the social, economic and cultural differences - what their data shows ("suggests" is probably more appropriate) is that people react to race even after controlling for the other factors, which is at least interesting.

Edit: just to clarify and follow up - here's my claim: if the relative dominance of Ashkenazi Jews among American scientists, or Vietnamese women among nail-salon entrepreneurs, were the result of, say, discrimination, or government subsidies at others' expense, or some sort of other external factor that made the "competition" unfair, then it would be fair to categorize that inequality as "unfortunate". As far as I'm aware, that's not the case for either of those examples (and in fact is somewhat the opposite). But if it were (and the author of the original comment we're talking about seems to make that assumption about whites being better off on many socioeconomic measures), then calling that inequality "unfortunate" wouldn't be out of line.

lionhearted3• 17 years ago

> I think it's pretty tough to make the case that economic and educational inequality in the United States along racial lines is intrinsically a good thing, particularly given the historical context.

I'll address it, but before I do - look at how you framed the question and response. It's mildly disingenuous and makes it hard to have a discussion. Take this:

"I think it's pretty tough to make the case that economic and educational inequality in the United States along racial lines is intrinsically a good thing"

I don't know anyone that's making that claim. I mean that literally - I don't know anyone who says, "Economic and educational inequality along racial lines is a good thing." Most certainly I didn't make the claim, and I don't know of anyone that has.

But let's talk about relative inequality, because it's important. Take some groups of people - could be race, gender, religion, favorite color of car, anything. Some of the groups are doing better than others.

Is there a problem there? Well, sure, there is. You've got some people not doing as well as the rest of people. It'd be good for them to do better.

But is the problem that there are others that are doing well? Well, this comes down to how you think the world operates. Is most wealth created by people benefiting humanity or destroying humanity?

This can actually be looked into, and generally speaking, the way to get wealthy is to benefit humanity. This is kind of new thinking though - the old world thinking is that stealing from and oppressing people was what successful people were doing. This leads to innate hostility to people doing well, which is misplaced. The path to wealth these days to benefit other people, as Vietnamese entrepreneurs and Jewish scientists have done.

So here's what I'm saying: You should do the best you can. If someone is not doing as well as you, it would be good for them to do better. It would not be good for you to do worse. You should not feel guilty or uneasy about doing well, or about the race or religion you're part of doing well. You can feel bad that other races or religions aren't doing as well. But you should always feel good that you're doing well, and keep trying to do well, and do right as much as you can while doing well.

rsheridan69• 17 years ago

>>> A lot of dating and who a person would consider for relationships is based on social, cultural and economic considerations, and it’s a simple and unfortunate fact that generally speaking whites are at the higher end of the social and economic spectrums.

That's not altogether true. Asians earn more on average than whites. The ethnic group with the highest income is Indians. It would be interesting to see the stats for Asianas broken down by - "American-ness" - do American-born, accentless Harold and Kumar do much better than FOBs?

kelnos4• 17 years ago

> It would be interesting to see the stats for Asianas broken down by - "American-ness" - do American-born, accentless Harold and Kumar do much better than FOBs?

I'd guess yes. "Blending in" can make it a lot easier to work with other people. Also being born in the US would make you more familiar with the US and how it works. Someone arriving in the US at age 25 would not only miss out on that intimate knowledge, but would likely have a bunch of misconceptions about how things worked based on their experiences back home.

Then again, you could also make the argument that the type of person who moves to a new country does so for a reason, usually because they think they'll have greater opportunities there. It's not unreasonable to expect that kind of person to be better focused and harder working, which may very well take up the slack.

But yeah, real stats would be interesting to see...

johnnybgoode• 17 years ago

Did they take class into account at all? That could explain some of the results. Or even if they did, and all of these stats have been adjusted for class, carryover from class stereotypes could still explain the results.

hughprime4• 17 years ago

There are a zillion factors which haven't been corrected for. As well as class, they include message length, message quality, profile quality, number of messages received on average by each class of respondee, income, education, number of cats owned and whether or not the man's profile consists of a shirtless photo posing in front of his Honda Civic (and I don't know why that mental image came to mind).

I imagine you could, by using fake profiles and fake messages, do a controlled experiment which took all these factors out. My guess would be that you'd still see a vaguely similar effect but that it would be much less pronounced.

araneae• 17 years ago

Agreed. I think message quality would be highly significant, because black males (not to generalize or anything) are much more likely to use netspeak such as "yo" or "wut" that we learned earlier were response killers. Of course, maybe the reason women don't like these words is because "yo" is a "black" word.

I didn't even think about the money thing, but we do know that women care an awful lot about it. Who knows; a lot of the blatant racism towards black men (i.e. in the self report section) could be because women generalize that black men are poor. It could also explain why everyone seems to want to get with a white dude; he's more likely to be rich/have higher status.

llimllib3• 17 years ago

> It’s ironic that white guys are worst responders

Ironic means "surprising". When you just got done describing in detail how white males get the best response from all other potential mates, the fact that they respond the least is completely unsurprising.

vaksel• 17 years ago

I don't think guy response rates are all that relevant. Let's face it, if a chick is the one reaching out to you, chances are she is of the lower caliber(a fatty). The good looking girls don't need to reach out, they get thousands of emails a month, they don't need to bother looking for guys.

llimllib3• 17 years ago

except that the authors were talking about relative response rates among men of different races.

theoneill• 17 years ago

That would actually be higher caliber.

psyklic3• 17 years ago

If a lot of people contact you, then you become more selective.

raganwald4• 17 years ago

I'm confused by all the talk of the word "racist." The article didn't mention the word "racist" in the title, and in fact the one time it talked about the word, it was to debunk a straw man suggestion that racism is a factor.

Are people dragging their^H^H^H^H^H^H own^H^H^H other baggage into this discussion?

avibryant• 17 years ago

Really? Maybe I misread, but I got the impression the author was presenting evidence in favor of, not against, the "white women are racist" statement. The way it's expressed ("nail in the coffin") is admittedly confusing, but in what way could he be said to be debunking it?

raganwald4• 17 years ago

Avi, I'll read it again, stand by for an edit

...

I just read it as saying that White Women preferred to respond to White Men. Maybe it's my lack of baggage on the subject, I don't associate "Preferring White Shmeckle" with "Racism."

To me, the word "racist" has all sorts of connotations around desiring a de-integration of society on colour lines, around various forms of employment discrimination, and around hate and fear. Expressing a preference when choosing a mate is not racism, nor is it particularly surprising.

tlrobinson3• 17 years ago

The part that caught my eye was the second sentence:

We’ve processed the messaging habits of almost a million people and are about to basically prove that [...] racism is alive and well.

That's basically the thesis for the rest of the post.

raganwald4• 17 years ago

If that's the thesis for the post, I am underwhelmed, I see no evidence for racism whatsoever as I understand the word. Maybe that's why I didn't see the post as having anything to do with racism... Because it doesn't.

rsheridan69• 17 years ago

No, but it mentioned the word "racism":

>We’ve processed the messaging habits of almost a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well.

emmett6• 17 years ago

Interesting to me: rate of reply seems inversely correlated with likelihood of reply. That is, if you're likely to reply, other people are less likely to reply to you.

My guess is that both of these things are correlated with social status. People with high social status are likely to be sought after (high rate of reply to their messages) and less likely to deign to reply (low rate of reply to others messages). It's well known that white males are perceived with highest social status, and black women with lowest, so these results make perfect sense in that context.

tlrobinson3• 17 years ago

If you're more likely to reply, you're probably less picky. If you're less picky then you're likely to take the "shotgun" approach of messaging many people, regardless of whether it would be a good match. It shouldn't be surprising if a higher percentage of those people don't respond than to those who's approach is more targeted.

But to confirm this we'd need to see the average number of messages sent by each group of people.

emmett6• 17 years ago

Average number of messages sent (and received) by race/gender would be a good control for this study, I agree. That's a good point.

kmcgivney• 17 years ago

In the article, the most staggering bias was white women's preference for white men, but also the general preference of women towards white men.

Given that these stats are coming from the USA, I think our culture - television, movies, etc - provides us with ample images of white males in positions of success and power. Maybe this sways women's perceptions?

DavidSJ3• 17 years ago

Correlation ≠ Causality.

There's no controlled experiment here. Just a bunch of data mining, with some variables controlled for.

dusklight2• 17 years ago

They never claimed causality.

And they also state at the end of the article that they do not have a representative sample of the population.

But if you do use the website and surf through some profiles, it becomes pretty clear that the majority of the users are, as the article states, younger, more educated, and more progressive than the average American. I would go even further and say that the vast majority of the users would not self-identify themselves as racist.

Now question for OKCupid would be, wouldn't it be interesting if you could make a table showing the relationship of race to socioeconomic status, and then the breakdown of reply rate by socioeconomic status?

DavidSJ3• 17 years ago

You say, "they never claimed causality," but they say, "Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back" and "racism is alive and well".

DavidSJ3• 17 years ago

For example, here's an alternative explanation consistent with their data:

Perhaps black females are generally more solicitous, and send out lots of communications, being generally non-discriminatory about who they communicate with. This would explain both their own high reply rates and their recipients' low reply rates.

codexon9• 17 years ago

I think this only confirmed what many people have known from experience.

The most surprising part was the number of people who crawled out of the woodwork who wanted to declare the results invalid or deny the racism:

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/9pbn8/dating_statis...

http://www.codexon.com/posts/okcupid-dating-statistics-shows...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851290

JesseAldridge• 17 years ago

This reminds me of a study my dad mentioned to me not too long ago...

Here's the key graph: http://imgur.com/bFcOw.png

And his explanation:

"They gave 77 white female Michigan State students several standard measures of racism at different times in their cycles. The "race bias" curve on the graph is a combination of the measures.

Their interpretation is based on evolution, avoiding outgroup fathers who won't be around to take care of the mother and child. One problem I see with that interpretation is that it is better for evolution to mix genes as much as possible. I don't really have a better explanation, though."

Also, this article seems relevant: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ReproductiveHealth/Story?id=425...

"marriages between third or fourth cousins in Iceland tended to produce more children and grandchildren than those between completely unrelated individuals"

hughprime4• 17 years ago

There is, as I understand it, some evidence for the idea that people learn what's attractive in a member of the opposite sex by essentially averaging out all the faces which they see while growing up. This makes a helluva lot of sense as an evolutionary strategy -- you learn what your species looks like by observing as many other members as you can, and then you try to mate with the least unusual-looking person you can. Aside from protecting your offspring from the weird disability-causing genes which are sometimes signalled by unusual-looking features, it's also a great strategy if you assume everyone else is using it too: if you mate with a non-unusual looking partner you'll get non-unusual-looking kids, who will then be sought-after mating partners.

Anyway, if our brains really do use this strategy I think it goes a long way towards explaining some of this data.

edit: I don't mean to imply that this is the only criterion our brains use -- we probably find most attractive people who are slightly taller, more muscular and/or larger-breasted than the average we see while growing up. However in other things like facial structure where no particular face is objectively fitter than any other, heading towards the average is a pretty good plan.

pg2• 17 years ago

Sometimes the comments on HN are more interesting than the article. This isn't one of those times. This article is full of surprises, whereas the comments are fairly predictable.

I wonder what the pattern is. Which articles tend to yield boring comment threads? Ones that involve politics? Ones that invoke identity?

What I'd really like to find are simple, automatic ways of detecting boring comment threads. I know one that works: more comments than points. Anyone have any suggestions for others?

noodle2• 17 years ago

seems like most submissions that have more comments than points tend to be boring/predictable. not always, but its a good indicator, as controversial topics tend to have most comments fall into certain predictable buckets.

pg2• 17 years ago

Sorry, I was editing my comment to mention this while you were suggesting it. That does in fact work very well.

rooshdi• 17 years ago

Plus, shocking or offensive comments are generally downgraded, even though they're not "boring" due to their controversial nature. It's also difficult to define what "boring" actually is since it has such a subjective meaning.

rms• 17 years ago

Blockquotes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859888

Perceval• 17 years ago

Some other HN user actually coded a Greasemonkey script to do just that: http://www.alexc.me/hnscore-another-look-at-post-quality-on-...

If you wanted to do it right, you'd need to collect a seed sample of articles you thought generated excessively boring/predictable comments. Then you could analyze them, generate grounded theory, and run the rules on the population of HN stories to look for false positives.

Any other recent examples of boring comment sections?

wheels• 17 years ago

I suspect threads with excessively high churn (combination of up and down-votes) across the comments in the thread indicate dogmas colliding. The false-positive to watch out for would be people saying interesting things that go against the status quo.

Something like:

  comment is interesting if (score * 2 + 5 > number_of_votes)
  thread is interesting if (number_of_interesting_children * 2 > number_of_children)

parse_tree• 17 years ago

How the heck is a preference in who you date "racism"? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. People have strong preferences over all sorts of superficial things - body type, hair color, hair style, breast size, height, etc. Is it really so hard to believe that someone's preference for XXXX skin tone is just as shallow as their preference for YYYY hair color? (I've yet to see a commenter to a survey showing men prefer blonds point to it as evidence of some deep seated prejudice/hatred said men have towards women of other hair colors.)

psyklic3• 17 years ago

What is even more shocking to me are the comments on OK Cupid to this post. Many of the commenters who say they are black/Indian/etc seem to acceptingly resign themselves to saying they're part of "less desirable" or "undesirable" groups, as if as a person they are in fact undesirable. (e.g. "As a member of a particularly undesirable racial group, ..." or "Some of us less desirable types ...")

The real shocker though is who advocates for restricting searches by race! From the comments, it is people who are part of undesirable groups who actually want OKC to be race-aware and allow people to discriminate.

Clearly the data shows that there are biases toward certain races. However, from my experience, finding potential dates online is a roller coaster ride. It has ups and downs, and unfortunately we are always looking for what causes those downs. After all, people just reject you without a reason!

With data like this, many people will just assume that RACE is the reason for rejection -- something they cannot do anything about -- when it is more likely something they can accommodate for. That is the real danger in reading too far into these studies -- dating is all about YOU, while these statistics are all about averages!

Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back (WRT Online Dating)

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