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. lostatheart1 says:

    Wow, I have to say I’ve never been more annoyed with this site until now… and that’s quite a stretch. How rude. Since when does having a preference equate to racism? I’ll tell you when… when a bigot is writing a blog.

    I happen to get very few responses, and those of mixed or other races tend to be in other countries. I’m not interested in dating anyone that lives in another country, because they are geographically inaccessible to me.

    My lack of replies are generally based on content of the original message, and whether or not they have Sexual Encounters listed as what they’re looking for… or some other thing that I’ve listed in my profile that shows me they didn’t bother reading mine. I also can spot the guys that will cuss me out for kindly rejecting them, so I sometimes don’t reply to those.

    I’m on other sites as well and don’t always have the time or energy to have a back and forth conversation about why I’m not interested. It’s very rare that I’m attracted to someone who’s attracted to me and vice versa. It goes along with looks, mannerisms, and speech… among other things.

    I’ve dated several different races, had friends of many colors, and don’t consider myself to be racist by any means. I do consider this blog to be highly offensive to white women who have some standards. The second you want to send a bunch of guys my way that actually match what I’m looking for, and they’re straight, single, good looking, and haven’t been missing for a year from OKC, go right ahead and send them. I’ll be waiting here to reply.

  2. Annie says:

    I fucking adore you, OKC. Why are you so awesome?

  3. CmoreButz says:

    What you are sexually attracted too and not attracted to does not constitute racism, if so what about white males with Asian fetishes or Black males with White fetishes. Its just that sexual preference. If it was say.. to hinder someones chances of getting a job or a place at the watering hole, yes that would be on the side of racism, but deciding what facial features and tones turn you on enough to let them potentially stick it in you.. is NOT… and yes thats all caps to drive it home… NOT, racism.

  4. Kevin says:

    You stole my thunder. I was eventually going to get enough information from forum posted questions to do this research. Good work though. Kudos for an unbiased presentation of the facts.

  5. len says:

    It’s funny that you cry about skin color, but find it perfectly acceptable to discriminate based on height and appearance, which is so prevalent you have to massage it out of your data.

  6. Kevin says:

    Why are only heterosexual relationship data present? Please tell me it’s because of small sample size

  7. 80plus80plus says:

    Something that bears considering is in my experience, I’ve found very few black women in my area on this site (perhaps this is different for others), and those that I have found typically have very low match percentages with me. This leads me to speculate that it’s possible certain races have cultural things that skew them toward matching more highly with people from other races who are less likely to respond (for example — and this is anecdotal — the black women who’s profiles I’ve browsed are far more likely to be more conservative/religious, which would mean they’d be less likely to match highly with white men who are more open and progressive).

  8. z says:

    Nope. I’m black, and have been on this site for over two years. I’ve always been anti-netspeak (even when it comes to text messaging, I punctuate and capitalize perfectly—pre-smartphone generation). I am positive I have better grammar than most people on the site. By the way, I’m not sure how new of a feature this is, but you can see a preview of the message without even opening it. You can also see that I’m black without opening it. Do the math.

    I’ll never understand why a simple reply has to = dating material. Did everyone forget that some people are here for “new friends” or “activity partners”? Not everybody messages for sexual encounters and long-term dating, and even so, it doesn’t have to boil down to being the love of your life. Oh, I know! Maybe okcupid should start offering prenuptial agreements for messaging!

  9. Polly says:

    Quite interesting.

    I think white men dominate our TV screens and marketing as THE race and sex to be. I’d wager that’s what creates this more than anything.

    Still, to comment on the data you haven’t taken into account where all these people come from. If they are ALL American or ALL British than the data might be more significant if they’re all from different countries I think that needs to be taken into account. I for one am reluctant to message back people with a less than excellent grasp of English.

    Also, sexual preference does constitute racism. You personally feel one or two races are superior to others in attractiveness, that is racism, but it is a completely benign form of racism. It’s just that racism is such a dirty word that the word seems to lack reason these days.

    In any case as I said before I reckon white man’s dominance as world leader, TV, marketing, wealth. It’s not exactly surprising is it. Everyone wants to be on top.

    Interesting results anyway, enjoyed reading it.

  10. newlyprofligate says:

    I would like to see this data stacked against that from a previous post, about the reply rates of first messages sorted by words used in them.

  11. 613 The Evil says:

    Middle eastern women beat all other women regarding the percentage of their messages that gets replied! How did that escape your commenting, Okcupid? It’s obvious. Not only white men reply to them more often. All males do. I find this intruguing.

  12. CRM__114 says:

    Crib, e_cassirer:

    Rather than argue with you over semantics I’ll simply point you to the dictionary definition of racism:

    “The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.”
    http://www.answers.com/racism

    Also, I’m fairly certain “proportion of facial features, hip to waist ratio (both sexes), and chest size” DO vary across races.

    But I’m not even willing to concede, based on the data provided, that daters have preferences for race per se. I see no evidence that OKC has attempted to control for other objective, nonracial aspects of desirability -such as employment, income, education, and single parenthood- that happen to vary by race in the general population.

    e_cassirer: As to your second point, actually I WAS being generous: on closer inspection Match% utility flatlines at 57%. I agree that there are certain Match questions it would be very helpful to know how a potential partner would answer, but unfortunately OKC doesn’t give us that information. It gives a composite score of many questions, and you can’t even know which questions a potential mate has answered, let alone how she answered them. And it fails to predict the one extant, objective measure of success: response rate.

  13. Duane Brown says:

    I agree with Kevin at the top. I wish they had more data for moi… how is it the same or different for us of the LGBT community. That’s what I want to know now. Why are only heterosexual relationship data present?

  14. David Craig Hiser says:

    It is not just a natural personal aesthetic preference.
    If it was, then it should average out the same among all races.

    It is also not a cultural issue.
    The author started out by showing match rates, which controls for personality issues. There are match questions about, for example, acceptability of netspeak.

    The last part, the answer to the question “would you prefer to date someone of your own race” doesn’t leave that possibility open anyway. The answer to that question is even more strongly skewed than response rates, and it can not be in response to something like netspeak, cultural differences, or even appearance, because it is a hypothetical question.
    The explanations of differences in employment, income, education, and single parenthood, applied to that question implies that people ASSUME that those characteristics will apply to all of a particular race. That is undeniably racism. Even if there are broad social differences along those lines, there are obviously a great many individual exceptions, and having a “strong preference” for ones own race means discounting the possibility of exceptions.

    There is also an obvious bias along traditionally social dominance lines.
    IE whites are more desirable across the board. Blacks are the least desirable. As I pointed out in my first sentence, if it were a matter of people liking their own kind, it should be consistent for every group. In fact, most women prefer whites even to their own race.

    The author controlled for appearance with user ratings of pictures, and for intellectual/emotional compatibility with match questions. Given the clear bias along social dominance roles, I don’t see how anyone can deny its an indication of racism. It doesn’t mean you don a white hood on the weekends. It means you have internalized certain generalizations.

    I mean, isn’t that one of the classic questions for racists in denial? “Would you date one?”

  15. Peter says:

    Interesting, it seems that US will eventually become a nation of 1 huge mixed race.

    I live in San Diego, and it does feel like me and my wife are the only non-interracial couples around. Tough times to be an asian male :(

  16. letsDoCrimes says:

    This is really interesting. I would like to see a more detailed explanation of the stats. I don’t have the stats background of the okc staff, but I’m interested in it.

    One thing I don’t see here is outgoing message bias by race. It would be an interesting stat itself, but it would also add another dimension to the results. For example, if males of race X strongly prefer females of race X and rarely message anyone else, their reply percentages from females of other races wouldn’t mean very much.

    Also, how does the total number of messages sent affect your reply percentage? It seems like it would be a parabolic function. If you message a small number of people, you are probably messaging the same few very attractive people that everyone else in your area is messaging. If you are messaging more people, your reply rate should go up because, presumably you are being more realistic. If you message a huge number of people, you are probably spamming a lot of people who don’t live near you and who don’t match you very well, so your percentage should go back down. This is just a blind guess though. I’d like to see an analysis by someone who is good at stats.

    I also want to chime in and agree with everyone who said that dating bias isn’t exactly the same thing as racism. Or, well, racism is really a lot of different things, some of which are egregious and some of which are just unavoidable consequences of human nature. What I mean is, dudes just want to date ladies who look like their moms. That’s normal, right? Right?

  17. Vontre says:

    My point more being, whenever you zoom out to a statistical level there are always going to be substantive differences between cultures and certain desirability traits are going to win out. On a personal matters, what indicates racism is not an individual’s average reply rate, but whether the actual subject of the person’s race is an influence in their decision making process. As an example, suppose that asian men are statistically shorter than average, and women statistically prefer taller men. If women therefore reply to asian men less often, the result is not an indicator of racial bias at all.

  18. Jessie Maims says:

    “That is, if men respond at lower rates to messages from black women, that doesn’t imply that they respond at lower rates *because* they are black women. There are many possible confounding factors. It could be that black women send out more letters to people with lower match percentages, for instance. Or it could be some other cultural difference such as, as catbus suggested, using shorthand like “ur”. Then discriminating based on that usage would result in a skew in reply rates by race.”

    So… you think all of these men here saying that black women are physically unattractive to them are

    a) just lying liars

    and/or

    b) Not common enough to be representative of a larger aversion that’s clearly reflected in the stats, and in the racial preference categories of every single non-IR niche dating site known to man? Occam’s Razor, guy. It slices, it dices, it makes julienne fries.

    Also, it would be interesting to see how many minorities it would take to successfully fill a “niche” demand for each group vs. what level of minority presence allows these effects to show. I thought because there were so few minorities here, that the ones here would at least fill a small “niche”, but apparently, it turns out that the acceptance level is much lower than even the number here, and probably not reflective of what the population will ever provide. (for instance, lots of Asian women but very few Asian men, more Indian women than Indian men, as many black people as there are in Utah, with fewer black women than black men, etc.)

  19. David Craig Hiser says:

    Forgot to mention: fetishism of one particular race (including not one’s own) is racism as well.

    And the people who deny housing or employment don’t think they are racist either. They honestly believe they are making associations based on objective personal characteristics. The trends of systemic racism have roots in subconscious associations that happen in the first second, and go on to color all subsequent interactions.
    The most surprising part of this report was how many people are actually conscious of it, and willing to answer honestly (albeit anonymously)

  20. christian says:

    To all the people here complaining that we’re ignoring the races’ different “obesity rates” and heights, please keep in mind that, as I say, the data sets were normalized for attractiveness. So insofar as a person’s weight affects this, it’s accounted for in the data. Ditto for height, for men.

  21. Jessie Maims says:

    “What I mean is, dudes just want to date ladies who look like their moms. That’s normal, right? Right?”

    But… since when did Asian women begin to look like white dudes’ moms?

  22. Khadiyah says:

    I agree with those who think culture has more to do with attraction than race and also with those who consider proximity/familiarity to be more relevant.

    I tend not to be interested in African Americans on this site because in my experience, they tend to be more sexist/sex-driven, less likely to use proper grammar and spelling, and less worldly. Africans, on the other hand, interest me quite a lot.

    Worldliness, ability to articulate clearly, and respect for me as a person are very important in any potential match for me and I gravitate toward those profiles that display them. It just happens that among my matches, many African Americans, and quite a few whites, don’t.

    For matching filters, I tried another site briefly that has something like this. I started my filter on “no preference,” but when every single match I got in two racial demographics was both sex-driven and unable to write in complete sentences, I started filtering those demographics out. It was sad, but like another poster, I didn’t want to waste time weeding through so many profiles that did not interest me to find the only one that might be interesting.

    Last, there is a series of match questions that ask about specific racial/ethnic groups. I forget them all, but one is, “Would you date a Middle Eastern person?” Perhaps analyses of these questions would be more meaningful for this discussion.

  23. Indian male says:

    As an “Indian male”, I have the lowest average response rate. (Thank god for Internet porn) But I wouldn’t use the word “racism” to describe the visceral distaste women have for me. Our preferences are a learned behavior heavily influenced by our environment. Preferring one’s own race is not an innate preference: most minority men get the lowest response rate from the same race female! And those tastes obviously change over time. Black men and Asian women are more desirable today than 1950, for example.

    These and other studies are revealing a deeper truth: white men are awesome. I’ve been watching my white friends closely but haven’t yet discovered why that is so. Same height, weight, education and income… could it be the sideways-turned baseball cap? The khaki pants? Maybe a minority woman can explain it to us.

  24. Jessie Maims says:

    “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.”

    But here, black men don’t come in second, they come in dead last, worse off than Asian males. You’re trying to fit the square peg of your theories into the round hole of these results. Also, most groups will prefer their own, outside of sites like these. Because of this, the minority of minorities that primarily seek white people will have a harder time in RL, and will be more likely to see the Internet as a tool to assist them.

    “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.”

    But what makes black men so thoroughly unpopular, then, if they’re considered these paragons of masculinity? And black people and Asian people both often have flat, wider facial features, high cheekbones, and full lips — a mixture of traits that are considered attractive and unattractive by white society. The deciding factor is probably the skin color, hair type, stereotypes, body type, height and weight that black women and Asian men are commonly associated with. Because of these factors, plainer-looking black people are often seen as wholly unattractive by outsiders, instead of just being seen as plain, which skews the perception of the group as of high, low, or average physical attractiveness. And as untrue and atrocious as I find the latter quote, I’ve also found that that belief is held and acted on wayyyy more commonly than people will ever admit in public, and more commonly than the progressive OKC crowd will even admit in anonymity.

  25. Antithestasia says:

    I am very racist against Hispanic men IRL, because I ride the metro in LA and get nothing but constant catcalls and whistles from them. It’s really gross.

    Online, though, race doesn’t affect my responses. I respond to the messages I feel a connection to, and that’s that. However, I have noticed a lot of messages I get from black & Latino guys here run something like, “daym gurl u lookin fine, suk my cock.” I’m not saying all messages from black & Latino guys read this, of course, but in my experience… that’s all I’ve got to go on here. I have dated and been attracted to men of literally every race and color, but I know that that’s why MY response stats are skewed.

  26. Gary Stock says:

    The first graph (Match / Reply correlation) shows a peculiar slip in the 90-95% range, followed by a rapid rebound toward 100%. This is oddly reminiscent of emotional responses to non-human beings with a near-human appearance (see graph here under “Theoretical Basis”):

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

    “…when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.”

    Might messaging data be hinting at an Uncanny Valley? Hmmm… as someone becomes “nearly” a perfect match, we feel reluctant to connect — until the match becomes “actually” perfect. Far-fetched, perhaps… but, since we’re just making shit up… right? lolz

  27. Kinky McCool says:

    Tell you what, though it might have already been said… A bias or ‘psychological slant’ might not be so obvious if things like ‘message settings options’ didn’t have ‘Whitelist’ for good with all the trimmings for people you like.. and ‘Blacklist’ for baddd.. with just a stump of an option saying ‘everyone here will show up with a filter warning’ More evidence of language aiding in negative reinforcement… Most people might not be aware or care about such subtleties but surely you do have a psych or two on your team don’t you Okcupid?

    Cute survey, as a black male i was generally unconvinced by the place.. but perhaps that’s just cause i live in LA.. i’ll leave you all to it, good luck.
    Bye

  28. Jessie Maims says:

    And for the women that claim that black men in particular are too sex driven/aggressive and don’t type in complete words/sentences… do you find that men of an east Asian background do the same? Because they’re replied to just as rarely by white females.

  29. Andrew says:

    Nice job Christian. Thanks for the info.

    Dang ladies a little offended that someone would dare call you racist? I mean no one personally called any one-person racist. Why take such offense to it. And like it or not if you “prefer” certain “skin tones” that is a form of racism. More mild than spreading the message of hate that the word “racist” is often associated with but still a form of it.

    It would be nice to see which areas have the most and least prejudice and it may also help to use messages between people that are geographically close to each other to avoid discrepancies because someone doesn’t respond to people that are far away.

    Still good work Christian, It was very insightful.

  30. Champagne says:

    Z I agree with you wholly.

    Now speaking from personal experience here goes. I am an african american female I grew up in a small maryland town where the school is predominantly caucasion so yes it is preference not racism. Perhaps OKC should let people list what races or exact preferences and perhaps this can be avoided. If you are less likely to reply to a certain skin tone or race then it is really also called standards because you can be a non-white race and get emails from another race but not reply because they do not fit your standards. But take into consideration it’s may not be racism but bigotry. I once knew a woman who once said she didn’t like or talk to black men because she would be raped. Sometimes you have to turn the television off and be your own person. Thes epeople may not respond because it would be socially unacceptable to come home with this other race to meet their parents.

    Too many factors can play into this but it’s not racism. I grew up in the country and attended an almost all black university and as childish as it is was picked on because I like a good many different music genres.

    At the same time maybe you should tell what races need not message? Ahh but you can not because then someone will say that ugly little word:racist.

    Okay now that I’ve rambled on I’m going to go find something else to do.

  31. cK ! says:

    I’m surprised to see no mention of geography anywhere. Now, that would be an interesting variable.

  32. Peter says:

    These are the kind of data sets you can only dream of having access to…. unbelievable work being done here with a fairly unique opportunity.

  33. Antithestasia says:

    Also, I notice that when I am looking through my top matches, they are overwhelmingly white. I am not matched with a whole lot of Asian guys, and almost no black, Latino, Middle Eastern, et cetera males. They’re almost exclusively Caucasian.

  34. Mostlygone says:

    Yeah, if you haven’t noticed, beauty in this country is highly normalized to caucasian looking people. Models, actors, and sex symbols are almost entirely white. Don’t blame the users, blame the culture.

    I anxiously await your next blog post about how skinny people get more replies.

  35. Jason says:

    Black women don.t get replies because most of them are overweight. This isn’t racist, its actually fact. Contrary to what Sir Mix-a-Lot raps about, the vast majority of guys dont dig overweight or full women.

  36. Tango2 says:

    Nice job OKCupid! Next topic: What I am looking for is someone reasonably active who matches my athletic lifestyle somewhat. I can’t find this anywhere except for sites that list by body types like a few extra pounds or athletic. Guys who want this match are left to furtively look for dancing and other clues in profiles and examine photos to see if hugging their prospective OKC heart throb would qualify them for tree hugger status. I appreciate trees but also run 20 miles a week. This match is more important to me than skin color.

  37. Jami says:

    It’s hardly racist to be attracted primarily to people of your own race. There is a really small proportion I find attractive in any other race, and of those, they would probably be considered universally attractive.

  38. tantramasseur says:

    Interesting stuff. I would point out that OTHER factors are most certainly involved here outside of the simple social explanations you offer.

    For example, evolutionary psychology. Men tend to choose women with a .7 waist to hip ratio. Perhaps black women are statistically less likely to have that? Men and women both tend to choose partners with more symmetrical features. Perhaps certain races tend to be more symmetric on average? You say you adjusted for the ratings of photos, but ratings of photos don’t account for these types of evolutionary factors.

    Also, from the evolutionary standpoint, we tend to choose people who not only have the closest match to us on the non-physical level, but also on the physical level.

    And none of this says anything about what happens after the email exchanges. It would be interesting to find out if this data continues to bear out when it comes to having sex and/or having long-term committed relationships. Do the imbalances seen in these charts continue to perpetuate themselves down the line to marriage, or do they lessen as we continue forward in time from the first response to an email?

    Lastly, I would point out that “I prefer to date people of X race” does not necessarily equate to “I am a racist.” Racism is:

    –noun
    1. a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.
    2. a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.
    3. hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.

    “I think Asian chicks look really hot because I love straight hair, and am turned off by black chicks because I hate curly hair” is NOT THE SAME as “Black people are inferior and I should rule over them.”

    We should be careful about saying this is due to racism. I’m not so sure.

    What happens when you put in height…just height…no other factors. I’ll bet the short guys like me get totally reamed! Is that “racism” too? Obviously not. Yet you had to remove that info from your dataset, or it would have thrown everything off. Is it irrational? Absolutely. But then…when was the last time you saw people (on average) being reasonable or rational?

    A: Exactly…you don’t see it that often.

    People on average are irrational. Women discount me because of my height all the time. Some are even rude about it. Even some of the ones who claim to be “spiritual” will totally diss me in a rude manner over my height. That’s irrational to the extreme…and I’m guessing if you showed us data sets on men’s height and women’s cup size, we’d see some pretty damned extreme reds and greens on your chart that make no logical rational sense whatever…and run quite opposite to match percentages…and make these race numbers look “grey” in comparison.

  39. Casual Observer says:

    Antithestasia – That accounts for some of the discrepancy but that’s what he addressed in the beginning of the post. The “what it should be” versus “what it is” percentages.

    I find it hard to believe that this is “racism” along the same lines of racial profiling, prejudice and the like. I am white and yes I rarely find myself attracted to black women, but it has happened (recently in fact). If this were some deep rooted sense of superiority, as the term “racism” implies today, why would there be exceptions?

  40. Jessie Maims says:

    Jason

    Christian said that they controlled for weight and attractiveness already.

    Still, I don’t think anyone would dispute that a thin, attractive black woman will usually get fewer replies/messages from everyone than a thin, attractive woman of another race, and an overweight, attractive white woman will get more replies/messages than her black counterpart — perhaps, even more than a thin, attractive black woman. Because if people aren’t searching for your racial group, no one knows if you’re attractive or not, or fat or not.

    Now if the claim is that black women don’t get searched for to message/replied to if they have a default face pic because they’re generally assumed to be an overweight race of women, sight unseen, that definitely may be a factor.

  41. MoleAllegedly says:

    What I’ve been ranting about for ages, and has been laughed off/ignored/angrily denied by many, has been proven by OkCupid.

  42. Gimmesomehotblackass says:

    Yup! check out http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/race/interractab1.txt

    Its no surprise that OKC has these statistics. The good news is that prejudices are slowly (and I mean very slowly) changing. So if your on dating sites such as these just holla at the black females. You won’t be disappointed :D

  43. Indian Male Too! says:

    I am here to confirm the findings of this study particularly the bit about White women being the most provincial.

    Since this is an anonymous post, I can be both immodest and honest at the same time: I am quite good looking, fine features, athletic and slim body type. In addition to that I am an intellectual, well-read, cosmopolitan, arty e.t.c I am not tall but I am every bit proportional.

    Guess what? Good looking, young, educated white women won’t give me a second look but will easily go out with a less well-endowed white guy. The white women who do stop to chat do acknowledge my looks and learning but then they aren’t the ones I want! There’s one more thing that should intrigue you all – urban, liberal white women are much more insular than rural, relatively conservative women. How’s that for the broadmindedness of liberal women?

    I actually have no problem with white women preferring their own kind. I just resent their hypocrisy; they should admit their preference publicly instead of going on and on about how they don’t discriminate when it comes to mating. As an immigrant I also have a nagging doubt whether I killed my chances of finding a perfect mate for myself by leaving the old country for a society filled with women who are friendly to me but who aren’t really considering me as a potential mate, simply because of my skin color.

  44. Dan says:

    Preference for race in dating is not the same as racism. If I’m not attracted to overly skinny people, or brunettes, etc, does that mean I think they’re inferior? Yes, racism can be one reason for preferring a certain race, but you’re making huge assumptions when you say that the people are necessarily racist, and frankly I take some offense to it.

    Speaking for myself, for a while, I was simply not attracted at all to black women (though I’ve gained a taste for them since). I guess I just wasn’t around many of them and wasn’t used to them. Who knows what. But I shouldn’t feel guilty about it. I should only go for people I’m actually interested in; dating someone as a favor to them isn’t really doing them, not to mention yourself, any favors. Dating is one place where people cannot be pressured into taking something they don’t really like, please keep political correctness away from it.

  45. Aaron says:

    Casual Observer, it is because (and this comes from someone trained in marketing), that what is sexualized in culture becomes a preference for the majority. You don’t just HAPPEN to be attracted to who you’re attracted to; all of that kind of stuff is triggered in your developmental years. So when “white is the most attractive” is pushed at someone from birth, it will be ingrained when they are ready to date. That’s also why people are attracted to their own races – they tend to see other people in their communities calling people of their own race attractive, so they believe it.

    Black female features are almost never sexualized, so many men find them unattractive. Asian men and Middle Eastern/Indian men are never sexualized in America. It’s a little different for black males who are VERY sexualized, and who women have a gut attraction to, but won’t DATE because of social reasons, given relevant polling. But either way, both are getting screwed over for no good reason, and things that tend to hedge towards racism – especially on the male end.

  46. london_dreamer says:

    Do you get a similar split in reply rates between US and European users?

  47. Salomo says:

    len: “It’s funny that you cry about skin color, but find it perfectly acceptable to discriminate based on height and appearance, which is so prevalent you have to massage it out of your data.”

    I completely agree with what len said. And i wonder what it says about us.

    If we, for instance, complain about white females replying mainly to white males, doesn’t that include without saying that we think everyone should have a chance to chat with a white woman? And doesn’t that imply that there is something special about whether the woman we chat to is white, black or any other colour? That implication – not the replying pattern – seems to be the true racism.

    And yet it is unfair that white people apparently have far more potential chat partners (dates?) to pick from, than people of other races. It is unfair the very same way, that it is unfair that tall men have more potential dates to pick from. And if we managed to abolish both these injustices, we will probably find 10 more.

    That said, I do believe there is a difference between personal discrimination based on height and discrimination based on race: While I never heard of tall people taking particular steps to make them be perceived as more attractive, white dominance was founded on a couple hundred years of exploration, exploitation and supression. But i fail to see how that makes personal discrimination based on race any worse than personal discrimination based on height. The white people that live today are no more responsible for their perception than the tall people.

    My conclusion from the interesting stats therefore simply is: We are too obsessed with questions of race. All that internal racism is interesting to observe, but it is not more upsetting than all the other things we already knew about human dating behaviour.

    Well, that and the fact that i should message more japanese girls. They’re hot and i have perfect chances with them… at least if you ignore the fact that i’m slightly overweight and as far as i heard japanese are far more biased against that.

  48. anonymous says:

    What we need is a chart based on age, not just race. It seems like for us women in particular, regardless of our race, our desirability plummets drastically after age 30. I would be curious to see if it’s true.

  49. bob_moniker says:

    Wow. I knew that race was an abnormally significant factor in this kind of stuff but I hadn’t realized the actual extent of it. Just wow.

    OKC, thanks for doing this.

  50. marginally convinced says:

    Your post begs the question. Calling it racism (do not deny it may be a symptom of racism) makes people imagine that your data prove racism when you’ve just given a bunch of numbers. What IF you had posted this without calling it anything? How interesting it might have been to see what conclusions people would have reached on their own.

    And, if you were to look ONLY at my messages to and from men (and women) you’d find very very little in any of them that has anything to do with dating. I am sure I’m not the only person using OKC who uses it in this way.

    But, yeah; this is nicely incendiary.