What is it that makes a culture unique? How are whites, blacks, Asians, or whoever different from everybody else? What tastes, interests, and concepts define an ethnic group? And is there any way to make fun of other races in public and get away with it?
These are big questions, and here's how we answered them.
We selected 526,000 OkCupid users at random and divided them into groups by their (self-stated) race. We then took all these people's profile essays (280 million words in total!) and isolated the words and phrases that made each racial group's essays statistically distinct from the others'.
For instance, it turns out that all kinds of people list sushi as one of their favorite foods. But Asians are the only group who also list sashimi; it's a racial outlier. Similarly, as we shall see, black people are 20 times more likely than everyone else to mention soul food, whereas no foods are distinct for white people, unless you count diet coke.

Using this kind of analysis, we were able find the interests, hobbies, tastes, and self-descriptions that are specially important to each racial group, as determined by the words of the group itself. The information in this article is not our opinion. It's data, aggregated from the essays of half a million real people.
So here's the real stuff white people like.
Click on the icons to toggle between men/women.
In general, I won't comment too much on these lists, because the whole point of this piece is to let the groups speak for themselves, but I have to say that the mind of the white man is the world's greatest sausagefest. Unless you're counting Queens of the Stone Age, there is not even one vaguely feminine thing on his list, and as far as broad categories go we have: sweaty guitar rock, bro-on-bro comedies, things with engines, and dystopias.
As for the interests of white women, you have romance novels, some country music, and a broad selection of Good Housekeeping type stuff. It's also amazing the extent to which their list shows a pastoral or rural self-mythology: bonfires, boating, horseback riding, thunderstorms. I remind you that OkCupid's user base is almost all in large cities, where to one degree or another, if you find yourself doing much of any of these things, civilization has come to an end.
If I had to choose over-arching themes for white people's lists, for men, I'd go with "frat house" and for women, "escapism." Whether one begot the other is a question I'll leave to the reader.
Stuff black people like.
Hopefully it's been obvious that the font-size of a phrase indicates the relative frequency with which it appears. So, toggling between black men and black women above, you can see that while soul food is important to both, it's really, really important to the women. In fact, soul food and black women is the single strongest phrase/group pair we found.
The above lists also make it clear that, regardless of whether Jesus himself was black, his most vocal followers definitely are. Religious expressions weren't among the top phrases for any of the other races, but they're all over the place for black men and (especially) black women, for whom 13 of the top 50 phrases are religious. Black people are more than twice as likely than average to mention their faith in their profiles.

Finally, it's worth noting that of the four lists we've seen so far, black women's is the only one to explicitly include someone of another race: Justin Timberlake.
Double finally, how bold is it that I am cool is the second most typical phrase for black men?
OkTrends Racial Stereotype #1
In the course of researching this article and, in particular, comparing white guys to black guys, a handy shortcut occurred to me:
If you're trying to figure out if white dudes like something, put fucking in the middle, and say it out loud. If it sounds totally badass, white dudes probably love it. Let's see this principle in practice:

Stuff Latinos like.
Music and dancing—merengue, bachata, reggaeton, salsa—are obviously very important to Latinos of both genders. The men have two other fascinating things going on: an interest in telling you about their sense of humor (i'm a funny guy, very funny, outgoing and funny, etc.) and an interest in industrial strength ass-kicking (mma, ufc, boxing, marines, etc.) Basically, if a Latin dude tells you a joke, you should laugh.
OkTrends Racial Stereotype #2
El chiste de knock-knock:

Latinas' interests are fairly typical for a dating site: you got friends, career, education, movies, music, a few physical details, and, oh yeah...morbid fear. We dug further into I'm terrified of (on their list at #42) and found which words typically came next. It's mostly insects and "the dark", though one expert tautologist is "terrified of being scared" and another woman is "terrified of Martians."
Stuff Asians like.
As you can see, both Asian men and women choose I'm simple as their go-to self-description. Contrast this to black men's I am cool and Latinos' I'm a funny guy. It's also interesting that Asian men very often mention their specific heritage (taiwan, korea, singapore, vietnam, china) while Asian women don't.
OkTrends Racial Stereotype #3
Combing through these lists, you can see the different ways women use cosmetics:
- White women show off their eyes (mascara is #5 on their list).
- Black women show off their lips (lip gloss, #7).
- Latinas show off both (mascara, #18 / lip gloss, #22).
- Asian women, however, show off their practicality (lip balm, #48).
So far, I've gone through racial groups in order of their prominence on OkCupid. For brevity (I know this is the internet), I'll present the remaining lists without foolish commentary. You can click any of the links to reveal them inline.
Stuff Indians like.
Stuff Middle Easterners like.
Stuff Pacific Islanders like.
We'll be revisiting race later this month, with a statistical investigation of interracial dating, and we're almost finished with the article on (bi-)sexuality we promised last time. Thanks for reading, everyone.
Till next time,

Is anyone else slightly bothered by the fact that the highest level of proficiency attained in this analysis is just below the 9th grade? Since this is a site primarily visited by Americans I think this speaks volumes about our educational system.
This was entertaining, but one thing that stuck out to me as a “hmm” was the fact that for women of Middle Eastern decent, their favorite things were cultures that weren’t theirs.
I’m curious if this is indicative of the the strongly patriarchal societies and cultures of the lands of their origin, or just the fact that they’re relative (compared to other immigrant waves) newcomers to places like the US (which makes up much of OKC’s population) and are want to learn more.
I will end this by sticking the Aladdin song in your head: “A whole new woooooorld!”
Those of you who are offended by this need to relax a little bit! I think it’s quite interesting that OK Cupid’s staff has taken the time to do various “studies” like this. It’s not an exact science, and nobody claimed it was, but it is interesting to show what common words and phrases come up most often for each race (and gender therein). I’m looking forward to more of these articles!
Groundhog Fucking Day doesn’t sound bad-ass at all.
And this totally ignores the fact that there are plenty of OKC users who are adopted and therefor their ethnicity doesn’t correlate with their race. That kind of puts a big wrench into your data because, as an Asian woman, I’m very much ethnically American and my profile reflects that. I wouldn’t even need to be adopted in order to identify myself with American ethnicity.
Basically, ethnicity is slowly becoming a choice, not something directly tied to genetics.
For the Indian Male box — you list ‘the kite runner’ twice. What was supposed to be the other thing listed there?
My mom is white, my dad is black, and they both have bit families. This is hilarious and amazing to me. My only regret/dispute is that Journey didn’t appear under the “what white people like” section.
As a white male, I find the black guy’s list full of fun stuff. But then I’m married, and thus not part of the network.
Most Interesting: of city dwelling lonely people who date on computers, white protestants have the least grammatically complex profiles. Indication of rhetorical proficiency, or suggestion of an adopted “everyman” technique a la George Bush? I dunno but there’s a PhD paper in it for somebody!
Separating out non-heterosexuals would be very interesting.
As a white woman, I am ashamed for my gender… or at least, its blondes. Apparently “I’m blond” is common in the profiles – but for a woman, that should actually be “I’m blondE”! The word comes from French, where the e at the end signifies a feminine adjective. But even if you haven’t taken French, like me, you should notice that English generally follows these conventions. “Hot blonde” implies a chick, etc.
*facepalm*
Serious Buddhists are really atheists.
salut merci as tous
whose the asian girl in the picture. Shes fffiinnneeee lol
I’m still trying to figure out how someone can be a “very serious” agnostic.
Interesting. Though the concept of “race” does not actually exist among humanity (all humans are the same “race”). And atheists’ level of writing proficiency shouldn’t not surprise anyone.
Haha I used to think white people were totally ridiculous, now I think white people and Asian people are equally ridiculous.
While Racial Stereotype #1 seems to be valid, there are some exceptions to the rule. “Groundhog fucking Day” sounds like it has a whole different [fucking] plot! But then again, that movie showed up on some other lists too, just not the stereotypical black dude list.
And why the heck do white women seem so fascinated by their body parts? I can understand feeling the need to specify one’s hair color, seeing as there’s more variation amongst white people, but “my toes?!” Seriously, what is so special about toes? Surely it’s not like your stereotypical white chick was raised by amputees or anything…
The fk is soul food?
Surely a better title for this post would be “Stuff White People Think They Should Talk About Liking in Order to Attract a Mate”?
The Red Sox are the most popular team? Shows your market penetration is still greatest in New England, methinks.
Overall pretty enlightening
Can we get a word frequency list broke down by religion?
there problem with this survey
and the way okc takes these words to match us
is that when i say i hate sushi, or don’t drink coffee or tea,
it just takes sushi, coffee, and tea, and assume i like it.
With apologies to my fellow humans worldwide, it would be very interesting to see these results filtered by countries, particularly the US&A. Then we could really drill down into proving or disproving some stereotypes based on cultural and ethnic background and experiences in the world’s largest melting pot.
As it is, these are merely racial groups, which span countries and cultures that sometimes have little relation. If in general the idea of a stereotype lacks validity, how much more meaningless (though fun) is it to have an international stereotype? There’s a big difference between the likes of an Asian person born in Beijing and another born in San Francisco, for instance…
Tapas are for Indian females but not Latinos.
Black dudes like playstation & xbox, not asian dudes as I used to think.
And it’s good to know what sort of snacks to offer people…
pacific islander males: gummy bears.
mid eastern/asian female: chocolate
indian female: dark chocolate
Remember that the “literacy” rating here refers to how people write when writing web copy that will be hastily judged by thousands of people. Even if you’re aiming to snare a PhD, you shouldn’t be writing above Grade 8, as measured by the Coleman-Liau Index. People just don’t have time to read that closely.
Writing at a level unsuitable for your audience is more likely a sign of pomposity than intelligence.
That was great. I find it really interesting that Indian, Asian, Middle Easterner, and Latino guys all have the phrase “I’m a simple guy” really highly on their lists. It’s probably because half the population is female, and so wouldn’t say that. I think these polls are perhaps more of a function of gender disparity in phrasing than the OP realizes.
Also, Daniel makes a great point about meaning inverting.
(Alas, I didn’t utter any of the typical white guy phrases.)
On behalf of white people, I would just like to apologize for all of the terrible authors we’ve made popular.
In fact, I’m going to apologize for Nicholas Sparks twice.
Christian,
It would be great if as a service you could provide where an individual finds himself/herself within the entire distribution. Just sayin’…..I would enjoy seeing that.
haha I’m a black female that sounds like a white male! this is hilarious. I guess I do talk about God in my profile, but that’s the only “black people” stuff I apparently like… but eh… hockey, hitchhikers guide… sign me up !
Love this blog.
echoing Daniel’s comments–I have lots of stuff on my profile that I say I *don’t* like, did you guys look for this??
Love this article! Thanks OKC, you guys rock. Would love to see more race/ethnic studies.
So, according to this, I must be a man. I don’t think this would surprise anyone, really.
Also atheists ftw.
This is the funniest shit ever. I love it. People really need to stop taking this so seriously; half the fun of statistics is what one could possibly conclude from crunching the numbers a certain way, truth or no. The ‘foodie’ thing for Asians, however–that’s totally true.
PS: what’s up with ‘swingers’ in so many results? I know there are a lot of non-monogamous people on OKC, but not THAT many. Is there a reference I’m missing here?
For one, to the poster that said a google search on Atheist IQ would show the exact opposite of this article… The graphs show that the Atheist population has a higher writing ability than all other religious categories… So how is it different? Maybe I missed something.
I think people are mostly aggravated by this because though there are members of each race that do not fit into these “majority” topics of interest, for the most part, stereotypes hold true. Here’s the thing: Stereotypes are that way for a reason. They become such because a high % of whatever community in question associates themselves/behaves/believes to the same things, in the same way. I’m a white woman, and I’ve never read Jodi Piccoult, and I have a tempered loathing for Nicholas Sparks. I sort of like that so many of the primary interests do not match with mine… it means I’m different from the caucasian status quo for females, therefore possibly more memorable.
Anyway, I do tend to find these things interesting, despite the comments where people obviously don’t understand the point. If we were all honest about how much we surf profiles, and what we see, I think we’d have to agree that for the most part, this information is accurate, just based on our general usage.
Wow, this was kinda strange, but in a funny almost-enlightening (but not really) sort of way.
Like LeeLeo, I’d like to see it broken down by sexuality. An overall straight/not-straight would be interesting within each gender.
rohan, it may also be some amount of ‘white kids’ thinking it cool without really understanding much of it. let’s say I know enough of that type! ;P
The title should be: The REAL ‘Stuff White AMERICANS Like’, obviously no one outside of America likes nascar…
Great article. Hilarious. I love the factual observations.
The problem is that we have here averages and there are no average people. They are a mythical stereotype made from averages like these.
It may be fun, but in a sense quite revealing, being an atheist I consider religion to be one of man’s most pressing problem, and through this study I again am proven right. Please people, stop believing outrageous and outdated stories. What saddens me most is that so many women believe in a religion that has nothing but contempt for them. Liberate yourselves women, we men need you to pull earth through the next century!
Coleman-Liau does not measure ‘sophistication’ or ‘proficiency'; it measures readability in terms of word and sentence length. Several of my college professors drilled the idea into my head that needlessly complex sentences are ineffective.
That said, fun blog post!
A-THE-ISTS! A-THE-ISTS! A-THE-ISTS!
*raises roof, wears sunglasses, reads and writes at 9th grade level*
I agree with LeeLeo. This study is only part-way done. If you’ve analyzed this many profiles for differences of interest in race and religion, where is the part looking at sexuality? The results for gays and straights would be as wildly different as those between ethnicities. And wouldn’t it be fascinating to look at the differences between religious gay people and non-religious gay people? You had my interest and then you lost it by not taking this study further.
HAHha… Being a quant for my profession, and a self-professed funny person… I have to say this is my current favorite internets… Thanks for the amazing piece!!
WHO THE FUCK CARES??!! WHAT DOES THIS PROVE!??? A THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE FOR ANOTHER BULLSHIT ARTICLE TO BRING ATTENTION TO AMERICAS “RACE” ISSUE!!!!
I think there are two important caveats to this data. The second being much more significant.
1: All of the people used are the kinds of people who would use online dating services, since thats where the sample population is from. This isn’t as significant anymore because online dating service are becoming more normal.
2: These are all attributes people are using to describe how they want other people to see them, not necessarily how they actually feel or are. I believe this could be an explanation for why so many of the most common responses are so stereo typical. Various societies have norms of how people should act or whats considered attractive. You would likely be thinking of all these things on top of any personal feelings of self consciousness and the like when your making one. Creating one of these profiles is a highly irregular activity and people dont necessarily act normal. genuinely when their in unfamiliar abnormal situations.
LeeLeo, you totally stole my comment! I was going to mention that none of this data seems relevant to me, but that’s not because I don’t fit with an “in-group” that has its own stereotypes and catch-phrases. I would be interested to learn of the most-used phrases for the bi-sexual and gay populations of both men and women.
That said, I loved the religion graphs, and agree with jon that they warrant a much more thorough analysis in their own post.