How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get

October 5th, 2009 by Christian Rudder

Welcome back, dorks. We’ve processed the messaging habits of over 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. It would be awesome if other big websites would go out on a limb and release their own race data, too. I can’t imagine they will: multi-million dollar enterprises rarely like to admit that the people generating those millions act like turds. But being poor gives us a certain freedom. To alienate all our users. So there.

When I first started looking at first-contact attempts and who was writing who back, it was immediately obvious that the sender’s race was a huge factor. Here are just a handful of the numbers that illustrate that:

The takeaway here is that although race shouldn’t matter in messaging, it does. A lot.

First of all, how do we know that race shouldn’t matter? Are we just making some after-school-special assumption that “true love is colorblind?” more compatibility usually
means more replies
No, we’re not: we know race shouldn’t matter to replies because the races all match each other more or less evenly, and reply rate correlates to matching. That is, more compatibility generally means more replies.

On OkCupid you create your own unique matching system, and that means your better matches are people you actually want talk to. Below is a graph showing match percentages vs. reply rates for a random sample of 500,000 people.As you can see, in general, the better you match someone, the more likely you are to reply to a first message from them.

We can see this principle in action when we look at our trusty control, the Zodiac. Here are the match and reply rates side-by-side, with similar rates colored yellow. There’s no real need to inspect the numbers; just observe the similar colors.

  • Throughout this post, yellowish colors are short-hand for “neutral” and red and green indicate “strong preference.”

People of the various Zodiac signs match each other all at roughly the average rate, and, as we would expect, they reply to messages similarly. In general, the correlation between match percentage and reply rate means that whenever we compare the match/reply charts for a given breakdown of the population, they should look about the same. However, this, like so many other fine assumptions, totally breaks down when race gets involved:

Again, don’t bother squinting, just check out the colors. We’ll soon look very closely at these tables.

So here’s last week’s compatibility by race table (I explained how we can confidently measure “compatibility” in that post). This is a blow-up of the leftmost table above:

As you can see, the races all match each other roughly evenly: good news. It means all other things being equal, two people, of whatever race, should have the same chance to have a successful relationshp. But now let’s look at the table of how individuals actually reply to each other’s messages. First we’ll examine messages sent by men to women (I know our gay readers are interested in same-sex versions of these tables, there’s a link to them here and at the end of this post):

The numbers on the perimeter of the table are the weighted average rates for each column/row. Here’s what we can know:

  • Black women write back the most. Whether it’s due to talkativeness, loneliness, or a sense of plain decency, black women are by far the most likely to respond to a first contact attempt. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and, overall, black women reply about a quarter more often that other women.
  • White men get more responses. Whatever it is, white males just get more replies from almost every group. We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, we did likewise with height.
  • White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates to non-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at 21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%. It’s here where things get interesting, for white women in particular. If you look at the match-by-race table before this one, the “should-look-like” one, you see that white women have an above-average compatibility with almost every group. Yet they only reply well to guys who look like them. There’s more data on this towards the end of the post.

Let’s see what happens when it’s the women writing the messages to men.

  • Men don’t write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.
  • White guys respond less overall. The average reply rate of non-white males is 48.1%, while white guys’ is only 40.5%. Basically, they write back about 20% less often. It’s ironic that white guys are worst responders, because as we saw above they in turn get the most replies. That has apparently made them very self-absorbed.

Finally, here are a couple tables that shed further light on our discussion. These are site-wide answers to a couple user-written match questions. They barely need any explanation: one comments on the other, really. Together they shed more light on the theory/practice schizophrenia of people’s racial attitudes.



It’s surely not just OkCupid users that are like this. In fact, it’s any dating site (and indeed any collection of people) would likely exhibit messaging biases similar to what I’ve written up. Any dating site probably
has these biases
According to our internal metrics, at least, OkCupid’s users are better-educated, younger, and far more progressive than the norm, so I can imagine that many sites would actually have worse race stats. But like I said at the beginning, we’ll probably never know. See you next week.


(Addendum to original post)

Same-Sex Data for Race vs. Reply Rates

As promised, here are the same-sex versions of last week’s charts and tables. In general, they show that straights and gays share many of the same inclinations, but the prejudices of the latter are perhaps a bit less pronounced. I should say at the top that some of the sample sizes for the various race/gender slices presented here are rather small (for instance, OkCupid doesn’t have many lesbians of Indian descent), and that accounts, I think, for some of the scatter-shot nature of the color tables. Race preferences are not nearly as stark here as they are with the heterosexual data.

See for yourself:

Still, there are a few conclusions we can draw:

  • Blacks get fewer responses. We saw this with the straight data, too, and here it’s true of both gay and lesbian senders. Black gay men get over 20% fewer responses than non-blacks, which is about how straight black men fared. Black women, on the other hand, do relatively much better with gays than straights. While they’re still the least replied-to group, the discrepancy is much smaller in the lesbian community.
  • Whites respond by far the least to anyone.. Both white lesbians and white gay men write the fewest replies. In fact, across the two charts, whites respond about 15% less often than non-whites, and white gay men show a marked preference for other whites. On the other hand, gay white women don’t have the segregationist tendencies of their straight counterparts; they just dis everyone. Whereas last week we saw that straight white women strongly preferred other whites to the exclusion of other groups, lesbian whites respond to all 9 racial groups roughly evenly, and, in general, the lesbian community seems relatively colorblind. Only Indian lesbians receive a response rate far off the average, and as I said above, the sample size there is limited and the results might be skewed by chance.
  • Asian lesbians are in demand, and they’re picky about other races. Gay Asian females are replied to the most, and, among the well-represented groups, they have the most defined racial preferences: they respond very well to other Asians, Whites, Native Americans, and Middle Easterners, but very poorly to the other groups. Latin women also express a clear preference, for Whites and Asians.
  • Men prefer Middle Easterners. Gay men and straight men both respond best to Middle Easterners, and the preference is quite dramatic. I’d be interested to hear any theories why this is so.

As we did last week, we can see that all groups think, theoretically, that interracial relationships are acceptable, yet again whites are the least willing to have such a relationship themselves. This time it’s the men, not the women, who prefer most to keep to their own: it’s interesting that both in reply patterns and in their answers to these two match questions, the behavior of white straight women and white gay men are so closely parallel.

To our friends in the gay and lesbian communities: thanks for being patient and waiting for this data. We will do gay-centric articles in the future, I promise. Lately, since we’ve been dealing with complex and data-intensive subjects like race and reply rates, we’ve had to restrict ourselves to straight data in the primary post. We felt that adding a discussion of gay and lesbian trends alongside straight ones would triple the length of an already long and dense post and surely more than triple reader confusion. We will keep looking for ways to present the information you rightly expect; for now, it will be in addenda such as this one.

1,557 Responses to “How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get”

  1. David says:

    This is not at all surprising.
    This country is founded on racism and continues to practice it as its primary cultural norm.
    Sad commentary

  2. Ceta says:

    It’s not just about race. Certain races have different apperance traits that make them either more or less attractive to some people.

    So it’s more along the lines of being shallow than racist. But at the same time sometimes I do worry about talking to people of a different race because I’m afraid I might say something offensive.

  3. WindyMan says:

    The numbers don’t lie, especially given the dataset. But, in my opinion, just because some prefers one type of person over another the basis of their race doesn’t automatically make them a racist. Racism infers that a particular race of people is inferior solely on the color of the skin, their heritage, or their cultural beliefs.

    If someone wants to disqualify someone else from an acquaintanceship only because they are black, or their skin color is the dominant factor, they are a racist. If someone thinks them unattractive and skin color doesn’t really factor into it (and who are you to judge someone else’s personal opinion?) they are not a racist.

    Hypothetically, let’s say I get a message from someone. I read their profile. I look at their pictures. I decide whether or not I reply, based on my personal preferences for who I want to maybe get to know better. If I don’t reply to someone, it’s because I think her and I wouldn’t get along because of differences in our profile, or (let’s be honest) they aren’t attractive, even in the “let’s be friends” sense. If this person was white, no one would raise an eyebrow. If this person was black, would you label me a racist?

    I don’t see how you could. I have seen plenty of pretty black ladies on OKCupid, and I’ve seen a few that I don’t want to be associated with because of match percentage or personality clashes based on profiles or tests. Not because I think black people are automatically inferior. That would be ridiculous for anyone to think in this modern age. It’s because I have my own personal definition of who is attractive physically and intellectually.

    If someone doesn’t like a black woman because of the color of her skin, and see an inferiority in that, they are a racist. If someone doesn’t like a black woman because she’s unattractive and/or and has a lousy profile, they are not a racist. Regardless of race, attraction is relative. That’s all there is to it.

  4. One Criterion says:

    Hat off to OKCupid for coming out with the data, including the exact numbers of users profiled (388,141 females and 638,702 males – good to know this).

    Of course, the conclusion about the “theory/practice schizophrenia of people’s racial attitudes” is exaggerated. Just as I am FOR gay marriage, but wouldn’t marry another guy, most people are FOR interracial marriage but simply are attracted to their own OR SIMILAR race. The latter is another important point, which actually indicates that racial preference is a bit worse:

    The second question was worded as “Would you strongly prefer to date someone of your own skin color/racial background”. I answered that question “No”, because I’d be fine dating White, Middle-Eastern, Latin American, Native American, some Indian and Asian women, but I’d simply not be attracted to African American women. That is NOT racism, however – I work and socially interact with black women, and don’t have any problem with it. Developing an intimate relationship, however, is a very different thing.

  5. ilimanjf says:

    Thanks for posting this information, very insightful.

  6. GB says:

    Racists, the lot of you.

    Kidding. I guess most white women just don’t want to give a black guy a chance.

  7. Colin says:

    A while back you posted about how length of message and use of grammar impacted your chances of getting a response. How about correlating same with race and seeing if there’s anything there?

  8. crystalline333 says:

    Yeah I have to object to those saying these results prove “racism” is still alive and well… I’ve got friends of all colors, religions etc, but am simply not as physically attracted to other races as I am to my own. Its solely a physical attraction thing, nothing to do with personality… It also seems that I am more specifically attracted to men who are from or descended from the same places my family came from… If I met someone of another race who was beautiful and we totally hit it off I’d date them, but its rarely happened, if ever.
    When I think back to when I was a little kid it was the same thing… For a good part of my childhood I went to a school where white kids were the minority. I was friends with everyone… most of my friends weren’t white, yet when I had crushes on kids in school it was always the white little boys that I liked… it was never a conscious thing, it just happened.

  9. Raymond says:

    The responses white people give when they’re called a “racist” are hilarious. haha This study just means my Ok Cupid profile will have to be 4x better than the next guy’s.

  10. Crib says:

    First and most obviously, if you prefer to date someone the same age as you it doesn’t make you an “ageist”, if you prefer to date someone in the same physical shape as you it doesn’t make you a “weightist”, and if you prefer to date someone the same race as you it doesn’t make you a “racist”. Judgments of subjective attractiveness are not judgments of moral worth.

    Actually those things are exactly what that makes you.

    If you superficially decide that somebody is not worth dating right off the bat then you are a “___”-ist.

    Not that there’s anything wrong with that you bunch of weirdos, but let’s be honest here. Pretending and denial just make problems worse.

  11. Jimbo says:

    To the dudes saying they’re not racist, but that they’re just “not attracted to those of a certain race.”

    THAT DOESN’T EXCUSE YOU.

    Racism always entails a lack of attraction for the race in question. The question is, are you not attracted to them for individually-developed reasons, or reasons shaped by stereotypes and culture? The latter I’d consider racist. A white female UCLA student told me how she thought all asian guys were creepers and nerds. She admitted she had never dated an asian guy, so how did her beliefs arise? It’s a far cry from saying that all gooks should be deported, but it reflected her ignorance and her willingness to attach herself to irrational beliefs attributed to race. It’s that kind of objectification based on race that constitutes racism in my mind. I think very few of us would categorize our own races broadly, such as “athletic” or “not athletic,” but doing so with other races is racism to me.

  12. sarko says:

    So, people who have more choice are more picky, women want men from a high social status group, and many care about their children’s possible issues with cultural/ethnic identity? What else is new?

    Also, notice that many of the trends in the reply rates can actually be spotted in the match pattern, just at a lower amplitude (e.g. the lower match of black and Indian men through the columns and the high match of white men). Notice how the averages given on the box’s borders are meaningless because they do not take into account the different numbers of people within each ethnic group (they are always decided mostly by the match with the white people). And that the global dependence between reply rate and match is actually only the one among white people – again, because they form the huge majority of the users.

    Srsly, the numbers are interesting, but the interpretation…

  13. Lot says:

    @CRM: You can’t conclude based on just the response rate that the matching algorithm is worthless, because the messages that are responded to aren’t sent at random. For example, I rarely find someone with <80% match interesting/seemingly compatible enough to send a message to them. It's quite possible that if I indiscriminately contacted everyone, I would get more response from 90%-matches than from 70%-matches. If we had statistics for how often viewing a profile results in sending a message, we'd have something to talk about.

  14. Jimbo says:

    Also, continuing with my comment above… racism is less about outward expressions than it is about underlying reasons for those expressions. “nigga” is the classic example. I’m a minority, but there’s a lot of politically incorrect or downright racist humor to me that I still find funny, only because I know the person behind it isn’t actually racist.

  15. Frodo Brobaggins says:

    This is awesome information. An as an asian guy that mostly dates non-asians, I can tell you that I am very aware of the general race dynamics when it comes to perceptions of attractiveness. Seeing this kind of data isn’t exactly surprising, but it is very satisfying to see your suspicions given very concrete form.

    I wouldn’t call these people racist, just not very open-minded. One of these days the numbers will even out a lot more, but until then, it just sucks more to be a minority.

  16. e_cassirer says:

    To CRM,

    Clever word-play with the suffix “ist.” Unfortunately, not a real argument–your counterexamples don’t apply any futher than being similar parts of speech. Consider that there are a number of significant, objective determinants of physical attracitvness, i.e. hotness, that extend accross cultural and racial differences: posture, symmetry and proportion of facial features, hip to waist ratio (both sexes), and chest size (also both sexes), just to name a few. Further, considering the impressive sample size of the study, I’ll go out on a limb and assume there are standard distributions of these features for any given ethnic community. That is to say there are proportionally as many objectively hot black women on OKC as there are objectively hot white men. So that’s where subjective ‘tastes’ enter the picture. But these personal preferences aren’t all that ‘subjective.’ It’s widely accepted that people are more usually attracted (physically) to what is more familiar/safe. However ‘personal’ that preference may be, it’s not some trancendental, etherial thing, but rather determined at the junctures of cultural circumstance and individual historical trajectory. So, if there is racial bais in one’s culture, resulting in say segreation, sterotyping, or a relative inundation with images of hot white dudes from an early age on as compared to a relatively scanty exposure to hot black female images…you get my hateful point. You like what you learn to like. That preference doesn’t make a person racist, however, the preference iteself, given the context of Americal culture, likely is by definition (as previous posters have mentioned). If the term makes you uncomfortable, call it culturally influenced preferences in physical attraction along racial lines or some such thing. But it doesn’t change the facts or the issue at hand.

    Also, you could be a little more generous with the relevance of match %. Its correlation to response rate plateaus after 70% really, not 60%. And it’s a little narrow minded to consider response rate prediction the sole measure of matching’s utility. It’s supposed to predict how well you’d get along in a relationship, not whether or not you’ll be starting one. I know I’ve been in relationships where I would have liked to know the answers to a few of those questions in advance.

  17. Will says:

    I think you need to be careful to account for the difference between race and culture. I don’t think I’m racist, but when dating I am ‘culturist’. And unfortunately race and culture are correlated so you’d have to be quite careful in your statistics to tease them apart.

    I should be clear: I don’t want to place any absolute ratings on different cultures, but there are certainly cultures that I find easier to relate to and cultures that I find harder to relate to.

    I am Australian (white and grew up in Australia), and there are two very different types of women of Asian descent I meet – those who grew up in Australia, and those who grew up overseas. Think first and second generation immigrants.

    They behave _completely_ differently.

    I’d happily date an asian woman who grew up in Australia. A relationship between me and a woman from certain asian cultures will struggle. Note that the biological race is the same in each case – it is their culture that is different.

    As I said above, I don’t want that to be interpreted as being negative in any absolute sense about either culture – just that different expectations about some things can make a relationship harder than it needs to be.

    Cheers,

    Will :-}

  18. Emily says:

    Very few black men have written me. Less than five, for sure. In every case, I didn’t reply because the message was less than one sentence and not well thought out in terms of content or grammar. They were almost always sexually suggestive.

    HOWEVER, my current boyfriend is black. Well, African. But still.

    What I’m getting at is that I don’t think this is a racial problem. I would agree that it’s a cultural difference.

  19. Crystalline333 says:

    So, one more thing. Would you categorize it as racism if a person only dates people outside of their race? You would have to say that that person is racist against their own race. I mean, its only fair if you’re going to call someone racist for only dating within their race. One of my relatives, for example, only likes black men, which is fine… its just a preference, she’s not racist, has white male friends, but isn’t sexually attracted to them. Nobody has a problem with that, do they?

    I’m really surprised at OKC for posting this blog… not because of the subject matter, but because of the closed mindedness lurking in the commentary. Whoever wrote it is clearly a bleeding-heart liberal and rather blind to all sides of the story. As far as I’m concerned, as someone mentioned in another comment, race sort of goes along with the other factors like age, weight, height etc. All of those things factor in to physical appearance. I would be really curious to see what the statistics would be if things like ‘thin people’s response rate to overweight people’ were looked at; Or ‘younger people’s response % to older people’, things like that. I’m sure you would find bias in all the categories. We all need to stop pretending that love is blind- because clearly it isn’t, for *most* people- and there is nothing wrong with that. Everyone has a preference when it comes to physical appearance. People don’t have a choice in what turns them on, its sort of innate.
    You might be able to get away with saying white chicks are “racist” if this was a place people come to make friends, and nothing more; but, since that isn’t the case, and a certain level of sexual attraction is necessary for someone to want to respond to a person, I have to say that all if these statistics say nothing about racism to me, all they do is show that white women are more physically attracted to white men.

  20. Devil'sChild says:

    I think this is great.

    It shows that people DO have sexual preferences based on race. You can call that racist if you like, but that’s NATURE mofo! I personally prefer Asian women. and the occasional white woman. I think a lot of Indian and Latinos are hot too. That’s MY personal preference, and I refuse to apologise for it to ANYONE.

    How would you like to be told you could only date your own race? Or another particular race? And that the reason was because to do otherwise was against the current societal fashion of racism or multiculturalism?

    I’d say FUCK THAT- I date who I want to and I have no control over my sexual attraction to others, or their attraction to me. Anyone who believes differently has a lot to learn about their own sexuality.

  21. WhatUPWitDat says:

    Hypothetical (And could be completely wrong):

    *Having White skin is a minority trait, like blues eyes, and blond hair.
    *Females have babies
    *When a white Female mates with another race, the chances the baby will be white skinned drops dramatically.
    *Mothers prefer to have children whose skin color is close to their own
    *White Females have the greatest risk of having a baby whose skin color is not like theirs if they mate outside their race.

    Therefore White Females are most likely not to want to mate outside their race

  22. Jessie Maims says:

    Um… but, at least as far as cultural markers in profiles show, from what I’ve seen, black people here are WAY more likely to be assimilated into mainstream/white culture on this site than in the general population… yet they still experience categorical shunning. Also, if it is cultural, it would show up in the match percentages, wouldn’t it? People with differing cultural backgrounds would naturally answer the questions differently, and match up with different sets of people. But in the first set of tables, there wasn’t anywhere near enough of a discrepancy in match percentage between the racial groups to warrant the extreme variations in reply rate that we see here.

  23. Don says:

    Being a person of color myself, I think this conversation casts a somewhat flip attitude towards real racism. Perhaps in some instances this shows racial preferences, which MIGHT be a symptom of an individual’s racist attitudes. But when both personal and systemic racism causes real social, economic, and physical harm to people in the world, the idea that I have a harder time getting a date with a Caucasian woman is the least of our worries. It’s arguments like these that tire people when the real issues arise.

  24. Naufrage says:

    Where’s the racism?

    I’m a white guy, I prefer (find more attractive) black women, so I’m more likely to respond to black girl.
    it’s not racism, it’s taste.

    Color does matter, it’s part of appearance.

    Or maybe you should talk about those dumb racists that doesn’t respond as much to the ugly people as they do to the beautiful one.

  25. Seedypoet says:

    Preferring to date someone who is the same race as you because that’s what you’re attracted to is not racism. However, preferring not to date someone on the basis that they are a particular race and think they are going to be a certain way because they are that race is racism. The numbers don’t show decisions based on attractiveness over racial exclusion, so that can’t be called outright racist.

    Places where races do mix are generally high population urban areas where people of different races have a greater chance of interacting, and as a result are able to dispel many stereotypes that may be responsible for an individual racially excluding potential mates. I would like to see the numbers reflected by geographical location at some point.

    Being a black man who has dated a lot of women of different races, I can say from experience that my chances of finding a woman open to an interracial relationship was far greater is places like New York, Virginia and Florida than they were in other places I’ve spend time such as Montreal, North Carolina, and Maine.

    I agree that the option for excluding people on the basis of race should be made available for those who would use it. OKC is primarily a dating site not a research project (or at least I hope so). I for one would prefer not to waste any time attempting to approach a person who would have absolutely no inclination towards dating me.

    On a side note: The compatibility percentages have been completely useless for me. Most of the women I’ve been attracted to (based on profile and questions) fall bellow 80%. No one above 70% has even contacted me. I generally aim at around 60%-80%, unless it’s a match test.

    @periapt: “Repulsion” is definitely not a reaction based on preferences. You’re basically saying that women of a certain race fill you with a sense of revulsion. That’s pretty hard to justify as anything other than bigotry.

  26. k says:

    These results are pretty consistent with a long line of empirical research on the attractiveness of different races. In studies conducted worldwide and across many cultures, there is an essentially universal result that men of ALL races prefer White and Asian women. Black women are consistently rated the least desirable/attractive (even by Black men). Women of ALL races prefer White men. There is variability in terms of whether Hispanic or Black men come in second (not all of these studies include Hispanics) but Asian men are consistently rated the least desirable.

    It’s also the case that Black women have more masculine facial features than other races and Asian men have more feminine facial features, which is generally used to explain why they’re the least attractive.

    I don’t know any of the studies that include Indian, Native American, Middle Eastern or Pacific Islanders as the to-be-rated groups though. They have been included as raters.

    And it’s really stupid to call someone racist because they are not physically attracted to individuals of a certain race.

  27. rockanddroll says:

    Yeah, its not racism for me either I find large doses of cultural pride disinteresting, and most visible ethnicities really make a big deal out of there history. Also they honour therie parents wishes and us white people think thats bull crap.

    As well, while i am attracted to asian girls, and persian girls, argentinians, I tend not to be attracted to other cultures for purely aesthetic reasons.

  28. Seedypoet says:

    Preferring to date someone who is the same race as you because that’s what you’re attracted to is not racism. However, preferring not to date someone on the basis that they are a particular race and think they are going to be a certain way because they are that race is racism. The numbers don’t show decisions based on attractiveness over racial exclusion, so thay can’t be called outright racist.

    Places where races do mix are generally high population urban areas where people of different races have a greater chance of interacting, and as a result are able to dispel many stereotypes that may be responsible for an individual racially excluding potential mates. I would like to see the numbers reflected by geographical location at some point.

    Being a black man who has dated a lot of women of different races, I can say from experience that my chances of finding a woman open to an interracial relationship was far greater is places like New York, Virginia and Florida than they were in other places I’ve spend time such as Montreal, North Carolina, and Maine.

    I agree that the option for excluding people on the basis of race should be made available for those who would use it. OKC is primarily a dating site not a research project (or at least I hope so). I for one would prefer not to waste any time attempting to approach a person who would have absolutely no inclination towards dating me.

    On a side note: The compatibility percentages have been completely useless for me. Most of the women I’ve been attracted to (based on profile and questions) fall bellow 80%. No one above 70% has even contacted me. I generally aim at around 60%-80%, unless it’s a match test.

    @periapt: “Repulsion” is definitely not a reaction based on preferences. You’re basically saying that women of a certain race fill you with a sense of revulsion. That’s pretty hard to justify as anything other than bigotry.

  29. Michael says:

    This study just shows stereotypes in action. White men and women seem to have it best in the dating field but that is because of the portrayal in the media, i.e. positive stereotypes.

    It goes to show minorities have to work that extra harder to get the ladies as they don’t have the advantage that white men do.

    Thanks for the expose!

  30. Anon. says:

    My friend is black and I have NEVER seen him date anyone other than white girls

  31. SingleNicaraguan says:

    KUDOS OKCupid! You stepped it notch, made it interesting and definitely got racy and I’m not totally surprised at the results and resulting conversation. These statistics were extremely fascinating. I like your site that much more. I think it will continue to attract younger more progressive people for it. Thanks for telling it like it is.

    It great to understand the likelihood of getting a hollaback!

    After reading a good chunk of the response I think the option to eliminate from search results the users with preferences against the race of the searcher’s specific race would be serious consideration.

    Without boiling everything down to race or any specific characteristic, I’m curious if your algorithm is smart enough to learn from the incidence of chatting/message and incorporate (skew/weight) the commonly answered questions/characteristics (your little icons on the bottom of pages) between those with whom any user has chatted/messaged.

    I am also surprised that you don’t have a subsequent rating system for individuals after they meet. It would be like a “customer satisfaction” rating on the experience of the previous person. I would like to be able to rate certain aspects of a person in order to incorporate that into your search and recommendation funnel. Luckily though, I’m pretty satisfied with the current match I’ve made on your site.

  32. Richard says:

    Because racism has become a 4-letter word, can we just say that people, for whatever reason, are predisposed to be attracted to certain races? It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person; you’re just like everybody else. But please, pretty pretty please, let’s not poo-poo the dating experiences, online or not, of people of color by saying “you’re imagining things, stop making something out of nothing.” It is NOT nothing.

    I totally understand and agree that people would be attracted to what is familiar to them, i.e. their own race. However, if that were totally true, then the reply percentage, while skewed, would be skewed equally, i.e. blacks would reply to blacks at the same rate that whites would reply to whites, etc. Obviously, the rates are not equal, and THAT is what is horrible. It’s the disparity that’s problematic. Certain race/gender combinations are valued above others. How can anyone not agree that this is happening and troubling?

    As one of the undervalued race/gender combinations, I can say from experience with other online dating sites, ones which do publish racial preferences, that, if there is a race excluded from someone’s preferences it’s almost always mine. Like someone else said, it’s not that one race is preferred, it’s that one is unpreferred. That’s horrible! And although I have never had the experience of being a black woman, I’d bet my bottom dollar that their online dating experiences are extremely similar. This is extremely frustrating and demoralizing, and it’s even more so when other people try to dismiss my concerns.

    Bottom line, our (define it however you want) culture has put a premium on some race/gender combinations while devaluing others.

    If OKC has the data, and really wants to stir the pot, it should publish a similar report, but not regarding reply rates. I want to see data regarding initial send/receive rates per capita. In other words, which race/gender combinations are receiving the highest % of messages relative to their overall population on OKC, and from whom are they receiving those messages? Even the most rose-colored glasses people on here can probably tell you that the numbers are not going to be equal across the board, and can probably predict how they’re going to shake out.

  33. White prick says:

    Hey, nice graphs. But are any of these percentages statistically significant?! Remember, you must take relative sample sizes into account, and in this case we’re probably dealing with wildly different numbers of individuals per group and hugely different numbers of attempted conversations between members of different groups. Until I hear mention of chi-squares and the like, this study might rightly be classified as bunk science.

  34. Ye says:

    indian people are asian holla! Already one proof of racism right there :-)

  35. Bram Cohen says:

    Very interesting data, but I think you drew some wrong conclusions from it.

    I tried taking your data, finding the unweighted mean average for the rows and columns (because weighting makes it not match the other data, and hence is inappropriate), and calculating the bias for or against each ethnicity per row and column, then compared each cell to the average for its row plus the average for its column minus the overall average, and got this:

    0.7 1.4 0.2 -4.6 2.5 0.9 1.5 -1.5 -1.2
    -1.6 -1.8 -0.0 1.2 -0.7 -0.3 -1.7 3.3 1.5
    -1.2 -1.5 2.3 2.5 0.7 -1.0 -1.3 -0.3 -0.1
    0.3 3.1 -1.1 -2.9 0.2 -1.5 1.2 1.2 -0.6
    2.1 1.9 -1.3 -1.1 -4.0 3.3 -2.0 1.0 0.2
    0.2 -3.0 -0.2 -0.0 3.1 0.4 -0.9 0.1 0.3
    2.2 -2.0 2.8 -3.0 -2.9 2.4 2.1 -3.9 2.3
    -4.6 2.2 -5.0 6.2 3.3 -2.3 2.3 1.3 -3.5
    1.9 -0.3 2.4 1.7 -2.2 -1.9 -1.2 -1.2 1.0

    As you can see, the deviations from a simple linear prediction are much smaller than the deviations between specific rows and columns. In particular, the rows and columns for whites and black actually have much smaller variance than the others, so attributing racial attitudes to any particular race seems to be misplaced. Most of the apparent pattern you were picking up on appears to be due to thresholding effects in your color scheme.

    The chart for men responding to women shows similar homogeneity (the response rate here is a lot higher, so you have to halve these deltas to get comparable values to the previous chart):

    -1.3 2.8 1.0 0.0 0.4 -1.5 1.7 -1.6 -1.5
    -5.6 -2.5 0.7 -0.3 0.0 3.1 5.4 -3.0 2.1
    3.9 -4.0 2.3 -2.7 -0.4 -3.3 1.9 2.6 -0.3
    4.5 1.6 -2.2 7.8 1.1 -2.7 -9.5 -0.9 0.3
    -3.6 -2.5 0.7 7.7 -2.0 7.1 -1.6 -5.0 -0.9
    -1.9 0.3 1.5 -0.5 -3.2 -4.1 1.1 6.8 -0.1
    2.5 -0.4 -5.2 3.8 -0.9 0.3 -1.5 2.1 -0.7
    1.3 4.4 0.6 -15.4 6.9 2.0 1.3 -2.1 1.0
    0.3 0.4 0.6 -0.4 -2.1 -1.0 1.3 0.9 0.0

    Note that the response rate of white men to middle eastern women, which you picked up on as being high, is actually 0.9% lower than is predicted by a simple linear model, so clearly your visualization was misleading. The one notably off number is that indian males don’t like responding to islander females, for some odd reason.

    There is one very interesting data point which you neglected to notice though. If you do a scatter plot of response rate given versus response rate received across races for both men and women, you see an inverse correlation in both cases. (Your weighted averages are probably much more appropriate for this graph, because it’s weighted vs. weighted) The reason is probably the obvious one – people who can get a good response rate from mailing out are less inclined to both responding to messages they receive. This is probably true for people who get better response rates for any reason, not just race.

    The upshot is that although I think your data analysis is somewhat flawed, and in particular you fault white women for something they aren’t doing, I draw the same basic conclusion, which is that white men are considered more desirable than other ethnicities while black women are considered less.

  36. B says:

    Here’s my stats. Scotland: “Out of 1000 people, 11 are Asian, 3 of mixed race, 3 Chinese, 2 black.” (http://83.137.212.42/sitearchive/cre/diversity/map/scotland/index.html)
    That means that by percentage, a lot of the messages I do get from non-white people are from far-away-places where dating really wouldn’t be feasible for me, sometimes have religion marked as “serious” in their profiles and don’t fail to tell me how important God is in their lives (big no-no for me), and more often than not of the “I’ll just message everything with a vagina that comes up in whatever search I’m doing” kind.
    Now of course I know this is probably not as relevant as the US where you have a much larger userbase, and I don’t even know if non-US data is included in your stats…
    I also agree with many commenters that “preference” isn’t the same as “racism” – the “is interracial marriage (in general, for ANYone) a bad idea?” question is much better for showing it than the “would you strongly prefer…”

  37. Emissary_Johor says:

    At least some of the “Whites”, which aren’t racists, but additionally aren’t racialists, will put “-/-” or “undeclared” into the “Ethnicity” field.

    Also, have a look at http://www.okcupid.com/tests/the-race-literacy-test

    Quote: “This 20-question Race Literacy Quiz was originally developed by California Newsreel, in association with the Association of American Colleges and Universities.”

  38. SOME1 who dsnt knw wht he's tlkn abt says:

    It is racist.

    Hypothesize for a moment that a happily married black man was married to a black woman. Now suppose that if the very same characteristics about her except race were in a Middle-Eastern woman; he would not want to date her… that is racist.

    Yes, people have preferences. Some people won’t date fat people… they are discriminating as well. And it’s fine. Just accept it. You discriminate based on many levels. We all do. Why does racism have to be the worst thing someone can be? It doesn’t mean that these white women are necessarily burning crosses and killing Indians. Or are they?

  39. Bram Cohen says:

    Further thoughts on my previous comment:

    From my analysis it appears that the stigma on interracial dating is completely gone, replaced by a general hierarchy of racial desirability which is approximately the same regardless of the ethnicity doing the picking.

    It’s possible that this result is due to you screwing up your normalization, since there are a zillion ways of doing that, for example different ethnicities have different income levels and rates of obesity, but my guess is that the results should be taken at face value, with women mostly valued based on how exotic they look, and men on the opposite, with the exception that black is viewed as all around undesirable. I’d like to point out that this isn’t racism. Each individual person has the right to have whatever aesthetic sense they please for what they want to have sex with, and there’s no either ethical or legal concept of forcing people to strike some kind of balance among their dating partners. One might find it unsettling and unpleasant for blacks to be viewed as unattractive, but that isn’t racism in and of itself, although it might very well be the byproduct of racism.

    By the way, I heard a nasty rumor that eharmony has a policy of trying to avoid interracial couples, which seems very wrong-headed given how your data adds up.

  40. ophelia_in_red says:

    I think these results are likely to be massively skewed by the fact that there are a lot of men on OkCupid—mostly Asian men but also a few black men—who send generic messages like the following one (which, from the country code, is from a man in Nigeria):

    “realy liked what i read about u.would realy love to talk with u on phone.heres my cell number…+234**********………..i must say i was impresed by ur profile,am quite new on this and will really like to hear from u.”

    Or, indeed, less subtle ones like this one:

    “You are very gorgeos
    You have nice boobs
    and
    very sexy legs”

    Personally, those are messages I’m not going to respond to. And broadly my experience has been that even though a few white men send messages like these, they are outnumbered by white men who send more appealing kinds of messages. I also note that these offputting messages are disproportionately sent by men who are actually living overseas.

    Of course everyone says that if they get a “nice” message from a non-white person, they respond to it. I hope that’s true of me. I’m not naïve to the possibility of deep-seated racist tendencies of which I am not consciously aware, but I do know that as a rule, messages like the examples above are not messages that I want to respond to, whoever wrote them. I would also add that I don’t often respond to messages from people who don’t live in the UK, because I’m not currently looking for penpals. Especially not penpals who primarily want to talk about my physical assets.

    So I think I would be careful to dismiss the entire thing as “racist”. Although I dare say there is a lot of racism around on OkCupid, and even the most liberal of us may be subconsciously party that racism, there are lots of factors that broadly correlate with race due to language gaps and cultural differences, and these may be affecting the response figures.

  41. NeeAnderTall says:

    U.S. White male interest in middle eastern women can be a multi-faceted proposition for them. Historically when soldiers deploy overseas, there will be some marriages with indeginous women in the country they are deployed too. Some could see it as the White males saving underpriviledged women from their situation by offering them a a more secular, with equal rights in the U.S. Another facet, is the discovery that women the world over each have a beauty all to their own, and bringing something exotic home has it’s trophy appeal. Venezuela for example tends to slow down the paperwork when it is discovered the Lady applying for an exit visa is beautiful. Venezuela considers it’s beautiful women a natural resource and is proud of their Miss Universe record. Mail order brides can be another indication of any racial Males interest in the exotic over “home grown” women who would be more dependant upon the male to provide for them in an Alien country. Lifting the veil off of the faces of the women of the Middle East and Persia has piqued the interests of the males in the West.

  42. Borodin says:

    As a person of color who has exclusively dated, well, caucasians – (and who generally eschews dating people of my own ethnicity/race) I have to say, it IS racist to have these sorts of preferences. In fact it’s the most FUNDAMENTAL form of racism. I’m willing to admit that I’m racist. See. That wasn’t so hard.

    What ALL of the posters miss is the dissonance between “theory” and “practice”. In other words, people aren’t willing to put their… mouth where their mouth is.

    Actually I suspect that this is much more prominent among the educated than among the less-educated. Perhaps OKC can sort the data in that way. But it’s interesting to see another data set confirm what’s been found in a previous study:

    http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/emir.kamenica/documents/racialPreferences.pdf

  43. InterestingData says:

    My comment is directed to Matt. “Did it occur to anyone that mixed-race children are difficult for everyone involved?” I am a mixed-race child. My mother is black and my father is white. I am LUCKY to be a mixed-race child. I find your post offensive. I am far more cultured and open than I would have been otherwise, which has opened many doors for me.

    As far a dating goes, maybe there should be more mixed race children. Not to brag, but EVERY race is attracted to me — even you so called “I’ve never considered dating outside my race” and its not becuase of the strang taboo/forbidden fruit thing. I’m cultured, well-travelled, with a post-graduate education, living in NYC. Even when I was on match.com, my mailbox was always overflowing and if I decided to write someone (any race, including white men) I would generally recieve a reply. I went on many dates– from men of all backgrounds. I am now in a serious relationship(3 years) with someone I met on Match.com, who is a white male (a German native, who certainly never considered dating someone with my background previously).

    So Matt, this is NOT 1950, so can you please refrain from posting such ignorant, ill-informed posts? Thanks.

  44. Borodin says:

    What I would like to see is, if other factors can modulate racism.

    Age
    Political affiliation (are republicans actually more or less racist than democrats?)
    Religiosity
    Education

  45. Ara Pacis says:

    First of all, these charts reveal correlation, not causation. There are too many other plausible reasons for why people do and do not write back.

    Second, the discussion seems to assume that preference race is independent of other, perhaps more important, issues, such as a concommitant culture.

    Third, the suggested implication is that racial bias in relationships is a bad thing. Why should this be considered a true moral failing? Racial discrimination for jobs is bad because race is assumed to have no bearing on one’s ability to perform an economic function. However, when considering a mating choice, one would find the genetics of the proposed partner to be highly relevant. Dating is one of the few activities where it’s okay to be highly discriminating of many factors, including race.

    Some might say racial discrimination in dating reflects prejudice, but if we parse the word. to prejudge someone implies the logical failure of jumping to conclusions based on limited information. This is not true in the context of mating relationships where an initial identification of race is sufficient data to determine the genetic attributes at issue. Thus, racial discrimination in dating does not reflect pre-judgement but actual (post) judgement.

    If some people want to define racial bias in dating as a form of racism, go ahead, yell wolf. All it will do is bring scorn from the majority of all populations that either don’t think it’s a big issue or actually prefer in-race dating. However, complaining might take away from real abuses that people suffer due to racism.

    On a personal note, I’m white-ish (irish spaniard), but my first non-solicited email was from a black woman. It was short and to the point, “Got a job?” She got a response, but no, I didn’t date her.

  46. afroman says:

    the perfect equation:
    being: black + muslim + live in africa + average look = 0 reply’s

  47. elektrovox says:

    There’s a very simple explanation for this that I think everyone is overlooking!

    A big metric in matching is based on physical location, so, of-course race is going to be a factor.

    If I lived in a very rural “white” area, the only matches I would see would be white women!

    Also, people of different races tend to have slightly different cultures, in that they listen to different music, have somewhat different values, read different books, etc etc.

    Personally, I can find girls of all races attractive, but that’s probably because I grew up in a very racial diverse settings.

    BUT, if, for example, I were to look at a black girl’s profile, and I see that she is really into braindead rap music, and dropped out of high school, and dresses like a skank, that would be a huge turn-off.
    I would also feel exactly the same way about a blonde-haired blue-eyed white girl who appeared to be a brain-dead hick.

    Unfortunately, girls that I happen to be attracted to (bookish, smart, articulate, geeky, and a bit wild) happen to mostly be White, or Asian.
    It’s as simple as that.
    I’ve met black girls that fit that description and they’re awesome and I wish more black girls were like that.

  48. Troy says:

    Interractial dating preferences have nothing to do with racism. Racism implies that a person feels his or her race is genetically superior to another race. Just because a person does not want to date outside his or her race, it doesn’t mean they feel their race is superior. Some people are just more attracted to members of their own race. Some people just are not comfortable with the cultural differences that go with interracial dating.

    This blog is ridiculous. When Christina Miliam messages me.. I’ll reply.

  49. Mista Rick says:

    This is proof that white women are NOT stealing black women’s black men.

  50. Renee says:

    You’re missing a key piece of information, which is how message content correlates with race. Almost every message I’ve gotten from a black male has been something like “yo wat up sexy” and we learned from a few blog posts ago that netspeak really kills your reply rate, I’m sure there’s plenty of racism, but I know that for myself that’s probably the biggest factor for why as a white female I reply to black males a lot less.