The online dating site OKCupid has a blog where they post analyses of the tons of data they collect, and it's really fascinating.
For instance the attractiveness of woman on OKCupid, as judged by the men on OKCupid, is a symmetrical bell curve. In other words, half the women are better-than-medium looking and half are worse-than-medium looking. But OKCupid's women rate 80% of OKCupid's guys as worse-than-medium looking! Even more interesting: while men are much more likely to send messages to the most attractive women, women are much more likely to send messages to men who are slightly less-than-average looking.
As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys' pursuing the all-but-unattainable. But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren't good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.Your Looks and Your Inbox (Thanks, Vann!)
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Well thats my problem then... I'm just to sexy for this Matching site! (don't correct me, I need this ego boost)
"the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her"
Interesting piece to read, but can't say I agree with this particular sentence. That a woman ranked a man as "worse-looking than medium" doesn't *necessarily* mean she thinks that he isn't "good enough" for her. It merely means ... hmm ... that he's worse-than-medium looking. It's possible that some women can objectively assess a man's looks relative to other men she's seen/known, but still consider him desirable in other ways.
As an ugly, I find these results offensive.
...like maybe they have money.
I'd like to see how the unattractive women rate the world, and how they message the world.
Same for the attractive women.
Same for the attractive and unattractive men.
Just to see.
So there's a few problems I have with this:
1) the 5 point rating thing they mention is Quick Match, and users are asked to rate the match based on the first 4 pictures of their profile and some of the text blurbs they write. It's not supposed to be "Hot or Not" The blurbs can be a reason for not ranking someone highly as well.
2) a rating of 4 or 5 on this scale causes a message to be sent to the person that they were ranked highly, showing them 9 profile pictures (1 is the person who ranked them, the other 8 are random) and then they are invited to start ranking people as well. If you rank the person who ranked you as a 4 or 5 a message is sent to both parties informing them of this, presumably as an ice breaker.
3) there's a "Can't Tell" button that effective functions as a no rating. I couldn't tell from the article what they did with profiles in that data set that were ranked "can't tell"
I personally never click a ranking less than 4 stars. I'll click Can't Tell instead. There's no upside to me to be ranking a woman as unattractive/uninteresting.
I've several times gotten the message that someone has ranked me as a 4 or 5. The names of the profiles behind the random additional pictures are available in the source of the email. You can open the quick match side by side with these pictures and pick out in the first 3-5 profiles which was the one who selected you. To date, I've only found 1 or 2 of those people interesting enough to select back.
I agree it's interesting information, but I don't think it's necessarily being analyzed correctly.
"average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway"
This is bad logic. Just because we deem their photos unattractive doesn't mean we won't date them or message them. I just means we don't like their photo.
And frankly, the guys who appear "attractive" on photos are often NOT in real life, and the ones who are "unattractive" in photos often are in real life. An attractive photograph does not an attractive person make.
(I met my bf on Lava, and his picture was not an "attractive" one, but looking at it, I thought "He looks like a jerk, but he looks he'd be fun". I wasn't wrong.)
Scott:
This data may have been collected before the Attractiveness and Personality ratings were merged.
I call bullshit. I never get messaged! I barely even get replies from the uglies.
What I find most interesting from the provided graphs is that the distribution is inverted: the message probability of women to men is similar to the men's attractiveness rating of women, while the message probability from men to women matches a reversal of the women's assessment of male attractiveness.
It makes me wonder who is providing the ratings and in which context: are the more attractive women (those receiving the highest volume of messages), as a part of the message transaction, also providing rating information on the attractiveness of the senders? If so you have a disproportionate distribution in that the more attractive women will be providing more of the ratings, and will also be experiencing a higher influx of messages and will therefore be less likely to feel any social consequences from providing that rating. Additionally, they may be annoyed at receiving many "ur hawt" message and thus further dissociated from a probable positive rating (as previously discussed on BoingBoing from OKCupid: http://boingboing.net/2009/10/06/charts-to-help-you-s.html).
Do they offer raw data?
"woman send are much more likely to send messages to men who are slightly less-than-average looking"
I'd say this is a little misleading. The graph is listing the total percentage of men and messages sent. There are a lot fewer men that are above average, so there will be correspondingly fewer messages sent to those men simply because they're harder to find. To state that this means that women are more likely to send messages to less-than-average-looking men suggests that women, given a choice between attractive and below-average, are more likely to message the below-average man, which isn't what the data shows.
It does, however, show that women aren't far more likely to message attractive men--they're just somewhat more likely to do so.
Another interesting perspective to bear in mind is that women don't necessarily rate the *same* men as attractive/unattractive, whereas men tend to rate the same women the same way, overall. So the data more likely suggests that women have specific tastes in men and prefer men who match those tastes, but that their tastes vary significantly so that many men would be considered overall below average but above average by a significant number of women.
This also seems to assume that the members of matchmaking sites are an accurate cross-section of the general population. Perhaps relatively unattractive men really are over-represented.
Not to sound sexist, but given our societal norms, don't females tend to put a lot more thought into the pictures they post of themselves online? And conversely, don't males care less about their online pictures? (I have no survey to back this up.) Wouldn't this account for some of the skewed bell curve in regards to males?
Maybe it's not that women are harsher in their ratings. Maybe it's because the men who create profiles in those websites *are* indeed generally worse-looking than the average. As for the distribution of the women, maybe women of all types do create profiles in the websites, or maybe men just think that pretty much whatever they can get is better than nothing (at least for short-term relationships), and thus rate women much more liberally.
Maybe the "Female Messaging and Male Attractiveness" graph implies that the women didn't base their messaging on visual attractiveness? From the figure, we can see that about 30% of the men were rated as a 1 (unattractive), but almost 30% of the messages still went to those men.
In other words, all of the men still had an equally likely chance of being messaged. This isn't exactly the case here since the messaging distribution is shifted slightly to the right compared to the attractiveness distribution.
Well, if it gives ugly chaps a second chance, I don't really see a huge problem.
My first reaction, upon seeing the Male -> Female message distribution was: "reverse uncanny valley!" It's not quite right here, but if the ratings were of a more continuous nature, instead of being discrete, we might be able to analyze what occurs close to the very right edge of the graph, where girls that just seem too perfect become a major turn-off (or they frighten most guys away), but perhaps this reverses at the point where perfection is reached and more guys would contact the #1-rated girl, or something like that.
Interesting results, in any case.
I'm a member of OkCupid, and I've got to say that, for my criteria anyways, more Quickmatches pop up that are "undesirable" in my opinion than are desirable. Is it always because I find them physically unattractive? No, definitely not. Most often, it's because their personality blurbs are rife with misspellings and poor punctuation, or they present themselves as being on a fast-track to nowhere.
I'd like to see a study about whether someone will like music more if they think the singer/musician is attractive. This would seem to be impirically true, but is it actually? And if so, what about authors, programmers, etc.?
Should have mentioned - I'm a gal, looking for a guy.
I don't get the comments above. These results generally confirm exactly what you'd expect to find in the real world, and mirror exactly how our culture trains the genders to view themselves and their opposite.
Men have a very rigidly standardised concept of the visual attractiveness of women set by the movies and advertising, and according to that scale, some are attractive, some are not, and most are bell-curved in between. Men view women as visual treats above all, and that visual importance is reflected here. But men's cultural training requires that they pursue the hottest chicks they can get, especially in a low-penalty environment such as this.
Women consider most men to be less than attractive physically, and, let's face it, male attractiveness is not highly valued in our culture - certainly not as highly as money or power. On the other hand, many women have long been conditioned to take what they can get in a man, or even less.
When I would go to the 95%-gay-men gym, there were very clear demographics. There were pretty boys who only mated with other pretty boys. Tattooed, shaved-head, hairy musclemen who only mated with their ilk. Guys who look like chihuahuas, who apparently didn't get to mate. And a couple of guys who didn't look like anyone else in the gym. The last group was the only one that interested me. Most of the men there would have said that I went for the ugly guys, but I just viewed them as the interesting ones.
@Doug Nelson:
Looks probably don't hurt, but "professional musician" is one of the few fields in which one can attain the status of Sex Symbol even with a face that looks like it's been repeatedly backed over by a semi. Just look at Keith Richards.
There's no man so poor, ugly, or stupid that some woman won't love him.
Eh. I'd say it still depends on how good a musician he is.
No doubt, but the best ophthalmologist in the world couldn't be a sex symbol if he had a face like Bob Dylan's.
While I love the OK cupid analysis site and love that you blogged about it, you made an error in your notes about the data.
You said that women "are much more likely to send messages to men who are slightly less-than-average looking." That's misleading. While the largest proportion of sends are to less-than-attractive males, that is likely because there are so many males labelled as unattractive! Each more-attractive-than-average male is likely to get more messages than his less-attractive brethren. This is a subtle but important point. Please please please be careful with your interpretations of stats, Mark!
For a detailed analysis of the phenom see H.L. Mencken "in Defense of Women"
the female > male messaging would be more interesting if it included the man's annual income, rather than his attractiveness.
Then the curve might be more similar to the male > female messaging pattern.
I personally would rank more than half the people (men and women) i see around town as attractive.
I think the interpretation of the graphs is a bit misleading. Based on the data, women are NOT biased toward ugly men. The reason they send more messages to unattractive guys is because there are more unattractive guys -- that is, looks don't really matter (unless they're very unattractive, in which case they get fewer messages).
What would be interesting is the ratio of the two curves -- that is, if I'm an ugly/average/attractive person, how many messages will I receive?
This is so funny to me because I have gone on a lot of dates from online sources (I'm a guy). And talking with women I've met online was almost the same story every time. They want literally everything from a guy when they would talk about what they wanted. And I would pretty much respond that there are two guys who fit that description - one of them is married and the other is gay... good luck to you! lol. Nice to see numbers behind the stereotype -
Looks matter to everyone.
The difference between men and women is where "looks" are on their list.
#25
If the medium to most attractive section of the male population recieved proportionally more messages than another section of the population it follows that they've been sent proportionally more messages.
It doesn't follow that most of the messages sent were sent to them.
Women "are much more likely to send messages to men who are slightly less-than-average looking." is correct, for this graph, because the majority of them did.
Frankly, as a woman I can tell everyone this:
Women pursue men who can fulfill their needs -- attractiveness falls below economic or sexual or emotional fulfillment. If you have all three of these, your face or body are (all but) irrelevant.
Women want relationships including marriage or potentially fatherhood, your commitment level being the primary entry point.
Pursue what you want, and be honest about it -- the response will reflect, and you will never feel backed into a corner. If all you want is sex, you may not get it, but at least you won't be ambushed.
"Men view women as visual treats above all ..."
I know what you're saying, and I like looking at women as much as the next guy likes looking at women.
But not as much as I like touching and tasting women. Visual stimulus is an appetizer. Touch and taste make up the main course.
As an OKCupid member, I tend to be a pretty big champion of them. But int his case, I don't think I can.
The way that looks ratings work on that site is that you rate the other person a 4 or higher (on a scale of 5), AND the other person does the same to you, it notifies both of you.
And I think it's that knowledge of notification that skews the data.
I rate almost anyone I'd put my penis in as a 4. Which I guess makes me a bigger slut, and a bit more sad than the average man on the site. (Data is data, man. It's not personal.)
But my guess is that women on OKCupid, knowing that a 4 leads to a notification, rate men lower unless they're really sure they do want said penises put into them. No point in inciting the desperate bro-bags like myself. (I just threw up in my mouth a little, coining the term bro-bag. Sorry about that y'all.) So they only rate someone as a 4 or higher, if they are more than a little certain that with a couple of drinks (or prayer, if you're into the weird shit) that they want to get busy with them.
My evidence... It's scant and circumstantial at best. But I do know this. I tend to get higher ratings and more open flirtations with people who live outside of 300 miles or so. Less danger. Or sample error. Fair enough.
And for the record. I'm not ugly. My profile is funny and clever. Or so I've been told. Check out twenty3skidoo on OKCupid, and tell me what you'd rate me. Because I just may be a gross married uggo talking out of his ass.
As Azurain and wch above correctly point out, the interpretation of the graph in the article is not quite correct.
Both the male and female messaging distributions show that more messages are being sent to those that are more attractive compared to the rest of the population. Male and female behaviors are consistent in this regard.
This is exactly like the real world. Walk into any room and rate how many women are attractive as opposed to how many men are attractive. There are almost always more attractive women than men.
I also have a OKC profile, and what you said about the rating system in Quickmatch is true (well, in my case, at least. I cannot speak for OKC sistahs.) If I think the guy seems alright, I'll give him a score high enough that he'll have a good score, but also not high enough that he'll be notified of my existence. Unless the guy's profile is made of complete win and awesome, I usually do not give out 4 stars.
In addition to this, I have a very sharpened sense for recognizing an Asshole. No matter how good looking the guy is, if his profile suggests that he's a Jackass, I'm going to give the sucker a low score out of sheer spite. That might seem judgmental, but I seriously doubt that any of those guys would choose a bookish lady like myself over some cute jock concubine with a boob job.
So, as you can see, I, as a female, take into consideration more than just looks when rating guys, with the addition of other factors such as my mood, perception of personality, motive, current barometric pressure, etc..
All that said, twenty3skidoo is adorable. :3
"The way that looks ratings work on that site is that you rate the other person a 4 or higher (on a scale of 5), AND the other person does the same to you, it notifies both of you."
Yeah, I had been thinking the same thing...even worse, and they may have changed this, but it use to be when the site was more 'fun' (i.e., they recently changed 'stalkers' to 'visitors' because they are looking for a professional image), it use to be that if you and the other person rated each other as 1s, you'd get a BURN.
I don't know how many fat ugly women rated me as a 1...yeah, this is superficial, but I actually started making notes on this. I *NEVER* got 'burns' from anyone but the most unattractive women ever...I regularly gave anyone that wasn't what I was looking for a 1.
Why? Because they weren't the ones I was looking for...they were sorted out...if they were at a 2 or 3, most likely, I knew they weren't whom I was looking for either, so I started rating them as 1s as well.
Criteria I look for? Education -- can they spell? I don't deal with txt speek...it sounds ignorant. Beyond that, at least some college.
Are they reasonably fit? Can they keep up if I were to do my saturday morning 30 mile bike ride? Could the climb the side of a mountain on a 5.9 rated climb? I camp in extreme areas...are they going to be able to do even a 10 mile hike to the site?
Kids? Got them, thats cool...but I don't want to be a part time father to someone elses kids. NEXT...
Those three things determine if you get a 1 or a 5...actually, since I realized what the burns were, and I really don't like offending someone I don't even know, and making them feel even more unattractive, I give 2s to everyone that would have gone to the 1 category any more. I mean, I'd have to be an awful, hateful person to PURPOSELY tell someone I wasn't attracted to that I wasn't attracted to them. Again, the ones that gave me 1s that were the mutual burns were almost ENTIRELY the most unattractive, women not just externally, but their words really just screamed RUN AWAY FROM ME UNLESS YOU WANT SOMETHING TO ABUSE AND BE ABUSED BY. Kinda sad...
Talking to other friends, this is pretty much the same think they experienced (I work in psychological research, and I was actually referred to this site because of all the tests and data...everyone I know in this area plays with this site).
Anyhoo...work to do...maybe I'll jump on OKC instead...
Thanks, anthropomorphictoast. =D
@Clif: Did they stop the burning? That's too bad actually. I always thought it was funny when you got notified of a new enemy out there.
To my knowledge, I've only been burned by physically attractive women. But I think that has more to do with my rating system than theirs. I only give mean ratings (1 or 2) if they "deserve" it for something other than looks. And if somebody (boy or girl) is classically attractive, but seems like a screaming D-bag, I tend to be merciless. If they're unattractive, I just don't rate them. No need to be mean, eh?