The REAL ‘Stuff White People Like’

September 8th, 2010 by Christian Rudder

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."

I feel obligated to state, on behalf of white men everywhere: That woman should get a grip. Martians are nothing compared to the Sardaukar.

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...

Sidenote: reading level

Since we were parsing all this text anyway, we thought it would be cool to do some basic reading-level analysis on what people had written about themselves. We used the Coleman-Liau Index, and when we partitioned the essays by the race of the writers, we found this:

Before anyone gets too charged-up about this, we also ran reading level by religion and found this:

Is there a Comic Sans version of the Bible? There really should be. We subdivided this chart further, by how serious each person was about their beliefs:

Note that for each of the faith-based belief systems I've listed, the people who are the least serious about them write at the highest level. On the other hand, the people who are most serious about not having faith (i.e. the "very serious" agnostics and atheists) score higher than any religious groups.

. . .

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,

923 Responses to “The REAL ‘Stuff White People Like’”

  1. Curt says:

    Well done! This was hilarious. I would be interested in seeing reading & writing proficiency by political tendencies too. Although, like religious beliefs and basic communication skills, I have an estimation.

  2. AJ says:

    Wow…so you racially profiled your site…good job…just what the world needs, another thing to point out stereotypical differences between people.

  3. AC says:

    I wonder why you were suddenly defensive about the racial results. Would you be as defensive if the data were the other way around?

    Also, in the broader population, agnostics outscore believers, and atheists are actually the lowest-scoring group (though OKCupid is probably not a representative sample, so it’s fair)
    http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2010/06/half-sigma-asserts-that-church.html

  4. Euan says:

    Dear god, I cringed at 99% of the words and phrases used. I think I’ve seen profiles with some combination of those words before, but I always thought they were trolls.

  5. khichri says:

    Would love to see the “What Native Americans” like list.

  6. Greg says:

    Soul Food is both a cuisine, and the name of a movie and its tv show spinoff. That might be why it appeared so often in black people’s profiles. Any reference to any of the three would show up.

  7. bornyesterday says:

    Conclusions with no explanation of the process which led to them are completely empty.

    I understand not wanting to provide the data, but at least give us some sort of explanation for how you created these lists. How is “if ur” something that black men like? It is farcical that you present this stuff as if there were some degree of rigor behind your conclusions.

  8. Daniel says:

    Fun to read as always, thank you :-)
    One question, did you check for words in the same sentence that would invert the meaning, e.g., “not”, “don’t like”, “hate” etc.?

  9. rohan says:

    Interesting to see the correlation between Buddhism and literacy; also interesting to note that far more self-professed Buddhists list their personal emphasis on Buddhist view/practice as ‘not all that serious’, than any of the other religious groups polled.

    I suggest that the greater number of not-serious Buddhists are Asian site users who though perhaps ‘Buddhist by birth’ (there is truthfully no such thing) have only a nominal understanding of the Buddhadharma per se and might, besides knowing a couple of Jataka tales, hit the temple with older family members a few times a year out of convention only.

  10. Tim McCormack says:

    Who is this Alicia Keys person? :-P

  11. Christian Rudder says:

    The phrases included in the black boxes are the top 50 phrases most statistically correlated to that group. We calculated this as follows:

    1. We calculated the frequency of every 1, 2, and 3 word phrase for the whole population.
    2. We calculated those same frequencies within each race/gender pair.
    3. For each phrase, we divided #2 by #1.
    4. This is the propensity of a given group to use a given phrase.
    5. The list you see is the phrases with the 50 highest ratios of #2/#1.

  12. BSG says:

    Maybe I’m a horrible person, but I think this is one of the funniest articles I’ve ever read. The racial stereotype boxes almost made me poop myself.

    The “Fucking” rule is my new favorite thing because it’s so absolutely accurate.

    “When a Latino man tells you a joke, you should laugh.”

    Oh man, comedy gold. OKCupid is one of my favorite sites simply for these fascinating analytic. I haven’t had an account in years, yet I still visit regularly. What a unique site/community.

  13. athensfemme says:

    None of the words or phrases on the list for ‘black women’ fit my profile (with the exception of dancing). So, I will not get offended at the sweeping generalizations that will inevitably be made because of this article.

  14. Shellac Fanatic says:

    You could have done an entire post on religion vs reading level – and it would likely have been even more amusing to include an axis for grammatical mistakes. Looks as if languagetool.org is a good bet for that. For English, it has 469 rules and checks for 197 false friends. And as with the other reading-level checkers, Coleman-Liau looks only at word length and sentence length (run-ons score higher? puh-lease) and not at vocabulary – little-used Anglo-Saxon words can be quite short, yet require a higher reading level – “dizen” is a good example of this. I also notice that they hand-wave about syllables vs character count saying that “it’s hard to break words into syllables”, yet that is the basis for hyphenation in English and has been a staple of text formatting subroutines (“hyphenators”) for decades.

    As usual, a great article – it’s very nice to see you guys digging through your data for interesting things!

  15. Mark says:

    Seems to me like “Alicia Keys” might be worth a listen. Besides the fact that “Alicia fucking Keys” sounds totally gay, she was high on a lot of lists.

  16. Jihad Punk 77 says:

    why are “Indians” and “Asians” in two seperate categories? It would have been better to use “SOUTH ASIANS” to include Pakistanis and Bangladeshi people, and for “Asians” to be specifically called “East Asian.”

  17. lorg says:

    It would be interesting to see the results for “middle eastern” split, especially for Israelis/non-Israelis. Being from Israel myself, it’s a bit strange to see the top phrases split between Arabia and Tel-Aviv :)
    Another interesting split would be between Arabs and Persians.
    My 0.02$…

  18. tehdood says:

    so basically.

    Whites = brand names, music, movies

    Blacks = urban culture, stuff on BET

    Latinos = dancing, and beauty

    Asians = food and studies

    Indians = basically the same things asians like

  19. bornyesterday says:

    @christian – thanks for the info on the processing of the data

  20. Will says:

    I would love to see an analysis of the profiles containing Murakami or Wes Anderson for common elements, especially in the Bay Area. They are strangely popular even for profiles you wouldn’t expect them to be — I think they’re put there for flavor because statistically, it can’t be the case that everyone likes Murakami, and yet he shows up constantly. He’s like the zombie apocalypse meme.

  21. Brian says:

    This is hilarious. Of course Atheists and Agnostics have the highest reading comprehension. Unlike, most religious people, we actually read the books instead of just drinking the kool-aid.

  22. Hmm says:

    Don’t you think it is somewhat socially/culturally problematic to boil down individuals expressing, perhaps, the most blatant form of neo-liberalism and equating them to a statistical mean of society?

    When people are collected at one social place for a specific reason (finding a date, mostly), they automatically have a defining quality that separates them.

    Stating that culture can be boiled down to a series of equations is dangerous.

  23. Georgie says:

    You’ve obviously never heard the Queens of the Stone Age

  24. Daniel says:

    I’m curious about the “other” category of religion and the statistics associated with it. thinking about my own profile and matches, I have “other…and very serious about it” and I write at a very high level. likewise, though many of my matches are atheist, the bulk of those stating a religion are Buddhist or Other, to varying degrees of zealotry. more importantly, I buck the white people trends laid out here something harsh, and so do almost every single match I have. I wonder just how typical the typical profile is in terms of the website’s profile base.

  25. booortz says:

    bornyesterday, he details the methodology fairly well. it’s not what they “like” but what phrases/word sequences appear as racial outliers.

    it seems your reading comprehension isn’t that great, i’m guessing you’re a devout protestant?

  26. Ben says:

    I know this is an analysis of race, but it would be really interesting to see this grouped for gay men and lesbians as well, my guess is that some of the “frat” goes away for white men. I also wonder to what extent sexuality mitigates race (i.e., does a common sexuality count more for difference between two people, or is it their race, or perhaps even both?)

  27. Al says:

    As one of my online friends observed, trying to defuse the reactions to the lower reading level results for certain races by referring to religion is interesting, considering that the correlation between black users and religion had already been commented on.

    Full disclosure: I am a very serious white Protestant, and my profile has a Coleman-Liau calculated average grade level of 10. My journal has an average grade level of 11 (at least one post registers 13, probably on account of words such as piquancy, ontology, panopticon, and prurient). Generalizations have their place, but we should be wary of judging the potential of belief systems to foster serious thought on the basis of them.

  28. John says:

    This correlates very strongly with my own findings. Namely, people are douches with shitty taste.

  29. Michael says:

    Very interesting and helps me with people in general and nice to help get insite into what women want.

  30. daiya says:

    Questions to help better understand the results–at what ages are these profiles most concentrated?

    How many of the half-million profiles got rejected for not selecting a race/ethnicity at all?

  31. daiya says:

    Also, statistically correlated means you calculated the lists to point up differences, right? What were the words that appeared at similar frequencies across all groups, the commonalities?

  32. techne says:

    “there is not even one vaguely feminine thing on his list”? Red sox, boating, and nascar are higher on the white women’s list than the white men’s. Makes one wonder what femininity is exactly. And to judge by text size they are more common interests among women than among men. I’d like to see you try and fit that in your gender identity mental construct.

    It’s also interesting to use text size to judge within-group heterogeneity. It seems to differ substantially between genders for all races–except Asians. Knowing “n”s would help further. How come you never report your n? Like many of us I’d like to see more stats in general…perhaps you could provide an appendix link to your methods and other descriptive stats, with the kind of method info you posted in the comments.

  33. FS says:

    and to this day, we Filipinos still can’t decide whether we’re Asian or Pacific Islander, lol.

  34. Geoff says:

    The writing comprehension section is meaningless since people will often intentionally use slang and other internet-isms.

    I’m not surprised that Asians came in high since they seem to be so devoid of personality and most likely will fill their profiles out like it’s a freaken resume ;)

  35. Joe says:

    It makes me wonder if you’ve ever even heard of anthropology, let alone taken a class in it.

  36. cynical_nerd says:

    I envy your data.

  37. Matthew says:

    that was awesome, please keep doing these! :D

  38. Peter says:

    I’m married, I don’t have a profile, I’m not looking for anyone. But, I assiduously read your blog posts. To my mind they are some of the absolute best interesting statistical writing and analysis on the web. Keep them coming, they are just totally awesome.

  39. Antonio says:

    This has to be the dumbest shit that I’ve read. This article was highly unnecessary.

  40. jon says:

    The religion graphs at the bottom of this post are hilarious – I think they warrant their own post or at least a followup

  41. D says:

    It’s statistics, people. It’s used for broad analysis.

    Stop saying “stereotype” when the people involved stereotyped THEMSELVES.

    If you’re an outlier, stop complaining. It just means you’re special.

  42. Olivvv says:

    The belief in the existence of “racial groups” is not data, nor analysis. it is a British/American cliche.

    “racial groups” are subjective. They come out of your eyes, not from reality.

    People don’t have a race, you see them with it.

    Race is not a scientific concept, it is subjective.

    Historically every attemps to scientifically define races has failed. Maybe you think that races are “obvious”. Then please challenge yourself instead of spreading around such an idiotic concept.

    Even though almost everybodyin the UK/US is believing it , it is deeply a misconception.

    That is where you fail at your data analysis. I hope you are good scientists and are able to question your work.

  43. Ash says:

    I think this is great, statistically speaking it really took alot of work and provided alot of information. Thanks :)

  44. Nom Chompsky says:

    This was an interesting analysis, but I have to take slight umbrage at the inclusion of the “writing proficiency level” bar graphs.

    It seems to me that the point of putting the information in bar graph form without really explaining the methodology, and then making a joke at the Bible’s expense, the writer was trying to agitate rather than explain. The tests don’t reflect how well the profile writers read, or even how well the profiles are written. They simply reflect the grade level you’d need to understand them, and they don’t even do that particularly well.

    Example: running Hemingway through Coleman-Liau gets you some unsurprisingly low scores. Ditto for Cormac McCarthy, and dozens of others of clearly talented writers. Somebody using easy-to-understand sentences doesn’t undermine their reading level or intelligence, and the (to me) clear implication of the graphs is that it does.

  45. Scooter says:

    from so many graphs come a myriad of conclusions that can be funny and hurtful at the same time. I understand this is to be fun and lighthearted, but to compartmentalize ethnically continues cultural ignorance. am i outside of my culture if i don’t share any of “our” top 50 words in my profile? is that conclusion too serious for a lighthearted article wanting to comment on our cultural differences? It isn’t helping anyone. Write about something more fun.

  46. marty says:

    You should be careful taking a readability metric and presenting it as a measure of “writing proficiency”. These are not the same thing. If anything, I would argue that a better writer produces more readable text.

    These articles are always interesting and often amusing, but the analyses are generally pretty weak and not supported by the data.

  47. Nonnormalizable says:

    Dude, I wish the data analysis in my thesis were this awesome! But, what would make them even more awesome would be error bars! Also, some measure of variance. We can’t tell from the charts how significant the writing level differences, e.g., are, or how large the effects are compared to the within-group variations.

  48. opele says:

    I don’t know how much time you took with the data but this article seems hastily put together. I found a couple errors that changed the meaning of sentences you seemed to intend to mean something else (for black women: is it “worth nothing” or “worth noting”?) and your CSS styles are out of whack. The fonts for the Asian word lists are so large, they dominate the article and are unreadable in and of themselves (without significantly more scrolling than I’d care to do). Don’t think it’s IE since the other word lists are a more modest size.

  49. Carly / elvenrose29 says:

    I *love* the analyses and unique articles/research OKC does… that’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed with the site over the years since I’ve joined.

    What do I have to do to *work* with you guys, though?! This, right here – this article & the other kooky psych/research things you guys do – *THIS* is my dream job, lol! (seriously!!)

    Yes, it’s generalized. Yes, it’s statistics. Yes, it’s funny as hell. No, not everything “fits” everyone; no, research is never perfect or completely representative. I think people who take this too seriously (along with, perhaps, those that take their religion too seriously?) need to educate themselves on the uses (including limitations and purpose) of statistics.

    …and sure, this stuff could be used to for racial profiling, stereotyping, etc… but those things happen *anyway* – at least they used the exact wording, etc., of the population being studied!

  50. Atheisto says:

    AJ, that article is a joke and you should be ashamed for posting it.

    It is measuring the intelligence of atheists/agnostics that attend church regularly? Uh, what?

    Not to mention that a simple Google search for “atheist GSS iq” shows tons of articles that conclude exactly the opposite. The more educated a person is, the more likely they are to have a higher IQ and reject religious superstition.