Your looks and your inbox

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/11/17/your-looks-and-online-dating/

by thirdusername • 17 years ago

315 102 17 years ago

blog.okcupid.com

patio112• 17 years ago

I have loved all of the okcupid linkbait.

Much of it conforms to the old wives tales or intuitions of people, but "The women who are subjectively rated the most attractive get disproportionately less attention from men. No, really, we're not making it up, we can demonstrate this with SQL" is a whole lot more fascinating than the equivalent finding justified by, ahem, wild speculation. (Or its close cousin, "We surveyed 18 men and 22 women who happened to be enrolled in psych 101 at this campus! Sweet, sweet empiricism!")

potatolicious3• 17 years ago

I too find statistical confirmation to be interesting, but even moreso is where OKCupid's data have contradicted common wisdom:

- Women rate 80% of males as less than average looking. The graph is completely off-kilter from what you might expect (a pretty usual normal distribution around 50%-attractive)

- The reply rate between sender/receiver attractive is also a really interesting social phenomenon. The unattractive recipient who gets a message from a very attractive member of the opposite sex is unlikely to respond. Self-esteem at work!

I love this sort of statistical drivel (I mean that in the absolute nicest way), it certainly beats reading pop-psych books.

patio112• 17 years ago

Total agreement. That's the beautiful thing about metrics. Anybody can convince you of what you already believe is true. The real value is when you can demonstrate that reality is different than what you think it is.

alex_c• 17 years ago

- Women rate 80% of males as less than average looking. The graph is completely off-kilter from what you might expect (a pretty usual normal distribution around 50%-attractive)

This is very interesting. It's always been almost impossible to get my gf to point out other guys she finds attractive - this might point towards a reason, although it still doesn't really provide an explanation.

orangecat2• 17 years ago

Women rate 80% of males as less than average looking. The graph is completely off-kilter from what you might expect

It doesn't completely surprise me; it's always been my impression that the average female is more attractive to the average male than vice versa. Although I wouldn't have expected the difference to be so large.

The unattractive recipient who gets a message from a very attractive member of the opposite sex is unlikely to respond. Self-esteem at work!

And the effect is much stronger for males writing to females. I can believe that; an ugly guy who gets an email from a hot girl may suspect it's a setup, but is probably more willing to take the chance.

ramchip• 17 years ago

80% of males as less than average looking

This could be partly due to the fact that especially good-looking men can find a mate easily, so they never get around to registering on a dating site. To the folks on HN it's probably a normal thing, but I believe dating sites still have a certain 'for losers' stigma in other social circles.

And on the other side, perhaps girls that are very picky cannot find a guy to their liking so they end up on dating sites in greater numbers than the average.

HeyLaughingBoy• 17 years ago

Actually it's exactly what I would expect. Cue the "96% of the population is undateable" Seinfeld quote!

Asking people to rate who's below average looking will generally result in the vast majority of people being rated as such. Yeah, statistically you'd expect around 50%, but once you throw human emotion into the mix all bets are off.

bdr• 17 years ago

OkCupid isn't a representative sample, either. Even more, you have to take into account the site mechanics: a mutual 4 or 5 star rating results in a "match event", but any other combination doesn't. So rating someone 1-3 is equivalent ("I don't want to talk to them") as is 4-5, and men and women's responses to this mechanic may influence their ratings in differing ways.

jrockway3• 17 years ago

Indeed. 4 stars for a guy could mean "this person is average looking, but I think I might get to fuck them" rather than "this person is in the top 80% of beauty".

jim-greer• 17 years ago

Really? And he didn't mention that in his post? Seems like that completely explains away the difference in attractiveness ratings then.

thirdusername3• 17 years ago

Two people mutually rating each other 1 star supposedly generates a burn message.

brandnewlow• 17 years ago

This is the case. Rating someone a 4 or 5 generates an e-mail to that person. So the only reason you rate someone a 4 or 5 is if you want them to come check you out.

snprbob86• 17 years ago

I believe the 4 or 5 star match event only happens if you are using Quick Match, not just browsing your matches. I could be wrong though. Also, I don't know what portion of ratings are done in Quick Match instead of just browsing profiles.

_cbsz2• 17 years ago

I don't understand how the QuickMatch/profile rating mechanic can be the ratings cited in the article. IIRC, The QuickMatch/profile ratings are from 1 to 5 stars. The cited ratings are from 0 to 5.

jmhodges• 17 years ago

For those who were confused by the contradiction of this comment and the actual post, it looks like "less attention from men" was probably supposed to be "more attention from men".

For instance:

"So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten."

(And it's doubly confusing because patio11 refers to it as an "old wive's tale".)

throw_away2• 17 years ago

He's talking about the dip at the extreme right of the messaging graph. The old wives' tale refers to the observation that some women on the extremely beautiful end of the scale aren't approached by very many men because they're perceived as "too" beautiful.

m0th87• 17 years ago

I don't think the data indicates that at all. According to the graph, ~6% of women are considered very attractive (5) and receive ~18% of the messages. ~15% of the women are considered pretty attractive (4) and receive ~28% of the messages. That means the population considered pretty attractive is 3 times larger, but only gets ~1.5x as many messages. Thus, those considered very attractive do indeed get more messages than those considered pretty attractive.

The graph is somewhat misleading in its portrayal, but I think if it did indicate your suspicions, the author would've surely said something about it.

ejames• 17 years ago

Favorite quote from the other posts on the blog: "This is what 'dying alone' looks like as a png." Lots of fun statistics, and some humor to boot.

jrockway3• 17 years ago

Not as hilarious when all the attractive girls ignore your messages because they are flooded with spam, however...

jimboyoungblood• 17 years ago

If they're ignoring you, doesn't that mean your messages are spam too?

abossy• 17 years ago

As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh.

The female rating is particular interesting. Are only ugly men on OKCupid (myself included)? Or do men look worse in pictures than women? After all, remove the makeup, carefully selected attire, and fancy hair, and you have your average male. Even photogenic men don't look as good as their photogenic counterparts, in my opinion.

vaksel• 17 years ago

most guys shoot from the hip when it comes to pictures, women prep the crap out of it.

Hell I know a girl who used photoshop to tweak a photo she used as a profile picture on facebook

netcan6• 17 years ago

If you're serious about online dating you should probably be getting professional profile photos.

jsz0• 17 years ago

Look on the bright side: If 80% of men classify as "worse-looking than medium" then they are actually on a more level playing ground with each other.

mynameishere• 17 years ago

I question the numbers. (Well, the female ones anyway.) I had a plentyoffish account a few years ago, and the image ratings averaged around 3.5 out of 10 for both men and women. I know that the hotornot guys had the same problem, and admitted to fudging everything upwards.

jjs• 17 years ago

    fudged_hotness = 10.0 * ((hotness / 10.0) ** (1 / gamma))

Then just crank up the gamma correction to 3.0, and your 3.5 out of ten is now a reasonably-attractive 7.0472987320648917 :)

albertcardona2• 17 years ago

okcupid is doing science. I wonder what academic will pick up this data and extract evolutionary biology conclusions from it.

lionhearted• 17 years ago

I don't know why you're being voted down - it seems to me like they are doing science, and I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a reference to Okcupid in a university study or a pop science book.

ovi256• 17 years ago

If they release their dataset, it'll spark a lot of research. Datamining researchers today use a lot of 'hot' datasets, from Netflix to ePinions, which are sometimes old, but they are available. In some research domains, it is not uncommon for data sets to have huge importance, including getting you tenure and being guaranteed resources to exploit the dataset you gathered.

cynicalkane• 17 years ago

The idea of okcupid "doing science" reminds me of the quote from the video game Portal, which is appropriate, because both things involve the thought that something is "doing science" when it really isn't.

Doing science, if we are to go by Feynman's exposition of it, involves more than just gathering data--it also means accounting for everything that can make your data wrong. OkCupid is just gathering data and presenting it. This is an important part of science, and it's interesting to read about, but it is not a sufficient condition for having done science.

memetichazard• 17 years ago

okcupid is doing science in the same way that Mythbusters is doing science.

Obligatory xkcd reference: http://xkcd.com/397/

mattmaroon• 17 years ago

Not really surprised about the female curve. They say attraction for males is 85% physical and 15% personality, and for women the reverse. Not sure on the accuracy of those numbers, but the general principle is probably true. And since you get no inkling of personality from a picture, it isn't shocking.

What I'd really like to see is if they listed the guys to one group of women as just photos, then to another given select bits of data, what would happen then. I suspect you'd see strong correlations, especially if income were there.

jacobolus• 17 years ago

> you get no inkling of personality from a picture

Really can't agree with this. How people present themselves in self-chosen photos tells quite a bit about personality.

psyklic2• 17 years ago

I agree with the OP -- from my experience, it's very difficult to tell how a person will act on a date, personality-wise, merely from their photos, profile, and non-video chat. And personality is such an essential part of a person for dating.

joezydeco2• 17 years ago

Man, ain't that the truth. My favorites are the following categories:

- The only good photos I have of myself are with friends in bars.

- My cat/dog has to be in the photo. I love my cat/dog more than I'll love you.

- The only time I look good is with my ex, so I'll crop his side of the picture out. You won't notice, will you?

- 20 self-photos of me in the bathroom mirror. Don't mind the mess in the background.

- I love to travel! Can you see that speck at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower? That's me!

netcan6• 17 years ago

That doesn't explain rating perfectly OK looking guys as 1 or 2, which is what seems to be happening.

I would have expected 3-4 to be most of the ratings. When I ask women if sush & such is good looking, they almost always say 'he's ok.' I concluded thought that women have a huge 'ok' range & small 'no way' & 'huba huba' ranges. What I should have concluded is that they're all liars.

mdemare2• 17 years ago

I've heard the theory that men mostly agree about who they consider attractive, but that women have much more varied tastes. Which of course suggests that women should approach men, not the other way around.

physcab2• 17 years ago

Ok, I'm going to go out and say it: There is an absurd amount of pressure on women in this society to be perfect.

Now, I'm not going to refute the fact that I wouldn't message the most-attractive women as well. But if the knee-jerk reaction of a woman is to reject the message from the most-attractive men or to harshly rate decently looking guys, there are outside factors affecting the female perspective of appearance, especially if the same isn't true for men.

diN0bot2• 17 years ago

sure. my first thought was: maybe the average guys on the site are worse looking than average. who knows? the statistics here are ridiculous.

_cbsz2• 17 years ago

To expound, men may have to retreat (when they're "retreating") to OKC because of below-average looks. Woman may have to retreat because of below-average personalities.

endtime2• 17 years ago

Did you read the whole article? Men's attractiveness ratings of women are healthily distributed, almost unbelievably so. And women rated about 8.3/10 (rather than perfect 10/10) got the most messages.

physcab2• 17 years ago

I did, but I'm not sure what in your comment disproves the self-esteem issue. My point is not what men think of women (how they rate them), but what women do when presented with the options I mentioned (attractive guys messaging them).

If an attractive guy messages me, I would be thinking as a woman "Wow, this is validating" instead of "No, he must have made a mistake". If it's the latter, you have to wonder what initially gave her the idea that he made a mistake? Was it something deeply engrained?

Maybe I didn't read the article correctly, but please don't assume I didn't read the whole thing. Starting off your comment like that is not very welcoming and doesn't add any value to the conversation.

joecode• 17 years ago

And women rated about 8.3/10 (rather than perfect 10/10) got the most messages.

This is a misleading statement. As a total number of messages, they did indeed get the most, since there are more of them, but the ones rated 10/10 still got a lot more messages per individual than those rated lower. And overall, the messages versus attractiveness curve is much steeper for men messaging women than the other way around.

diN0bot2• 17 years ago

interesting. women rate men much more harshly on looks, yet a woman's attractiveness is much more important for whether they receive messages.

sounds like attractiveness is rated poorly for women partly because it doesn't speak to women.

Tichy7• 17 years ago

A dating site for geeks would have to include automatic A/B Testing for profile pictures.

Can't wait for their analysis of what makes a photo attractive. Especially as for men, men don't seem to have a good grasp as to what would appeal to women.

notauser• 17 years ago

Based on empirical data (walking through my local park each morning) if I ever put a profile on a dating site the best picture to use would be one of my puppy.

Periodic• 17 years ago

Or you with your puppy featured prominently? That might draw their attention away from any of your flaws, and when they think of you they'll immediately associate your face with a cute and cuddly puppy.

There's also the other idea. What if you put something unattractive near you to make your attractiveness stand out more. Like you volunteering to help a disfigured veteran (no offense meant to disfigured veterans). It might make you look more attractive in comparison.

netcan6• 17 years ago

That sounds kind of evil. It would be a great way of getting advice for dressing, hair, etc.

Tichy7• 17 years ago

Come to think of it, HotOrNot probably already provides that.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

for that you want 'http://styleguidance.com/

dkarl• 17 years ago

I think A/B testing would be unhelpful or even counterproductive because of the difficulty of picking a measurement to maximize. You want a flattering but reasonably accurate advertisement for yourself, which doesn't correlate with any easily gatherable metric. If you try to maximize clicks or emails, you run the risk of making your profile marginally more attractive to lots of people you aren't interested in at the cost of looking generic and boring to the few people you are interested in. You could reduce this effect by maximizing the percentage of profile views that result in emails, but it would still be distorted by people who mistake you for someone entirely different. If you maximize emails from interesting prospects, which is what you really want, it will take a long time to accumulate a useful amount of data.

bd• 17 years ago

"Totally decent-looking" dudes are actually co-founders of OkCupid :)

http://www.okcupid.com/about-us

araneae• 17 years ago

tl:dr Women don't have unrealistic expectations, they're just saying that the average man is ugly.

I disagree with their interpretation that the fact that women rate men as low attractiveness means they "have unrealistic standards for the 'average' member of the opposite sex."

Remember, they didn't ask "do you think this guy is above or below the average attractiveness." They asked "is this guy attractive." There's an implicit assumption that "neither attractive or unattractive" is equivalent to "average attractiveness of men."

That assumption is wrong. Men are ugly. So of course most men will be rated as more unattractive on average than women.

noodle• 17 years ago

this sounds like a problem to solve. i'd like to see a dating site that doesn't involve browsing profiles like a catalog, and encourages people to respond to messages a bit more.

kills two birds with one stone, if you have it based on a smarter matching algorithm that requires you to give private feedback on people you interact with, to help hone your personal recommendations. also makes fake profiles and spamming a much tougher prospect, and would probably give it an overall safer feel.

sganesh• 17 years ago

As far as I know, women date by "how you make them feel?" not how a guy looks :)

alttab• 17 years ago

I met my girlfriend on ok Cupid over a year ago within a week of signing up. The site was a lot less spammy then, and most would say we just got dumb lucky.

I've done other sites and while pictures matter, if you're not a 4 or 5 not coming across boring or desperate will make you a 4 or 5 in comparison.

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