




This post investigates female attractiveness, but without the usual photo analysis stuff. Instead, we look past a woman's picture, into the reaction she creates in the reptile mind of the human male.
Among the remarkable things we'll show:

Fair warning: we're about to objectify women, big-time. The whole purpose of this blog is to analyze OkCupid's data, and without a little bit of objectification that's impossible. Men will get their turn under the microscope soon enough. As usual, none of this (with the exception of the celebrity examples) is my opinion. All data is collected from actual user activity.

Let's start at the beginning.
All people, but especially guys, spend a disproportionate amount of energy searching for, browsing, and messaging our hottest users. As I've noted before, a hot woman receives roughly 4× the messages an average-looking woman gets, and 25× as many as an ugly one. Getting swamped with messages drives users, especially women, away. So we have to analyze and redirect this tendency, lest OkCupid become sausageparty.com.
Every so often we run diagnostic plots like the one below, showing how many messages a sampling of 5,000 women, sorted by attractiveness, received over the last month.

These graphs are adjusted for race, location, age, profile completeness, login activity, and so on—the only meaningful difference between the people plotted is their looks. After running a bunch of these, we began to ask ourselves: what else accounts for the wide spread of the x's, particularly on the "above-average" half of the graph? Is it just randomness?
What is it about her:

that gets more attention than her:

...even though according to our users, they're both good-looking?
Not all 7s are the same
It turns out that the first step to understanding this phenomenon is to go deeper into the mathematically different ways you can be attractive.
For example, using the classic 10-point 'looks' scale, let's say a person's a 7. It could be that everyone who sees her thinks exactly that: she's pretty cute.

But something extreme like this could just as easily be going on:

If all we know is that she is a 7, there's no way to tell. Maybe for some guys our hypothetical woman is the cat's pajamas and for the rest she's the cat Garfield. Who knows?
As it turns out, this distribution of opinions is very important.
Celebrity photos: to titillate and inform
Let's look at what the ratings distribution might be for a couple famous people. I imagine that for, say, the actress Kristen Bell it would be roughly like this:

Ms. Bell is universally considered good-looking, but it's not like she's a supermodel or anything. She would probably get a few votes in the 'super hot' range, lots around 'very attractive', and almost none at the 'unattractive' end of the graph.
Compare her to Megan Fox, who might rate like this:

On the far right, you have the many dudes who think she's the sexiest thing ever. On the far left, you have the small number of people who have seen her movies.
Unlike Ms. Bell, Ms. Fox produces a strong reaction, even if it's sometimes negative.
Real People
Now let's look back at the two real users from before, this time with their own graphs. OkCupid uses a 1 to 5 star system for rating people, so the rest of our discussion will be in those terms. All the users pictured were generous and confident enough to allow us to dissect their experience on our site, and we appreciate it. Okay, so we have:
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As you can see, though the average attractiveness for the two women above is very close, their vote patterns differ. On the left you have consensus, and on the right you have split opinion.
To put a fine point on it:
- Ms. Left is, in an absolute sense, considered slightly more attractive
- Ms. Right was also given the lowest rating 142% more often
- yet Ms. Right gets 3× as many messages
When we began pairing other people of similar looks and profiles, but different message outcomes, this pattern presented itself again and again. The less-messaged woman was usually considered consistently attractive, while the more-messaged woman often created variation in male opinion. Here are a couple more examples:
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We felt like were on to something, so, being math nerds, we put on sweatpants. Then we did some work.
Our first result was to compare the standard deviation of a woman's votes to the messages she gets. The more men disagree about a woman's looks, the more they like her. We found that the more men disagree about a woman's looks, the more they like her. I've plotted the deviation vs. messages curve below, again including some examples.
The women along the graph are near the 80th percentile in overall attractiveness. You can click the tiny thumbnails to expand them.








As you can see, a woman gets a better response from men as men become less consistent in their opinions of her.
Our next step was to analyze a woman's actual vote pattern of 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, and 5s:
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If You're Into Algebra
We did a regression on the votes for and messages to a sample of 43,000 women. To keep everything consistent, all the women were straight, between the ages of 20 and 27, and lived in the same city. The formula given in the body of the post was the best-fit we found on our second regression, after dropping the m3 term because its p-value was very near 1.
msgs are the number of messages the woman received during the observation period. The constant k reflects her overall level of site activity. For this equation, R2 = .28, which isn't great in a lab or on a problem set, but is actually very good in a real-world environment.
This required a bit more math and is harder to explain with a simple line-chart. Basically, we derived a formula to predict the amount of attention a woman gets, based on the curve of her votes. With this we can translate what guys think of a woman's looks into how much attention she actually gets.
The equation we arrived at might look opaque, but when we get into it, we'll see it says some funny things about guys and how they decide which women to hit on.

The most important thing to understand is that the ms are the men voting on her looks, making up her graph, like so:

And those ms with positive numbers in front contribute to messaging; the ones with negative numbers subtract from it. Here's what this formula is telling us:
The more men who say you're hot, the more messages you get.
How we know this—the .9 in front of m5 is the biggest positive number, meaning that the guys who think you're amazing (voting you a perfect '5') are the strongest contributors to your messaging income. This is certainly an expected result and gives us some indication our formula is making sense.
Men who think you're cute actually subtract from your message count.
How we know this—because the .1 coefficient in front of m4 is negative. This tells us that guys giving you a '4', who are actually rating you above average-looking, are taking away from the messages you get. Very surprising. In fact, when you combine this with the positive number in front of the m1 term, our formula says that, statistically speaking:

This is a pretty crazy result, but every time we ran the numbers—changing the constraints, trying different data samples, and so on—it came back to stare us in the face.
What We Think Is Going On
So this is our paradox: when some men think you're ugly, other men are more likely to message you. And when some men think you're cute, other men become less interested. Why would this happen? Perhaps a little game theory can explain:
Suppose you're a man who's really into someone. If you suspect other men are uninterested, it means less competition. You therefore have an added incentive to send a message. You might start thinking: maybe she's lonely. . . maybe she's just waiting to find a guy who appreciates her. . . at least I won't get lost in the crowd. . . maybe these small thoughts, plus the fact that you really think she's hot, prod you to action. You send her the perfectly crafted opening message.
On the other hand, a woman with a preponderance of '4' votes, someone conventionally cute, but not totally hot, might appear to be more in-demand than she actually is. To the typical man considering her, she's obviously attractive enough to create the impression that other guys are into her, too. But maybe she's not hot enough for him to throw caution (and grammar) to the wind and send her a message. It's the curse of being cute.
The overall picture looks something like this:

Finally: What This Could Mean To You
I don't assume every woman cares if guys notice her or not, but if you do, what does all the above analysis mean in practical terms?
Well, fundamentally, it's hard to change your overall attractiveness (the big single number we were talking about at the beginning). However, the variance you create is under your control, and it's simple to maximize:
As you've probably already noticed, women with tattoos and piercings seem to have an intuitive grasp of this principle. They show off what makes them different, and who cares if some people don't like it. And they get lots of attention from men.
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But our advice can apply to anyone. Browsing OkCupid, I see so many photos that are clearly designed to minimize some supposedly unattractive trait—the close-cropped picture of a person who's probably overweight is the classic example. We now have mathematical evidence that minimizing your "flaws" is the opposite of what you should do. If you're a little chubby, play it up. If you have a big nose, play it up. If you have a weird snaggletooth, play it up: statistically, the guys who don't like it can only help you, and the ones who do like it will be all the more excited.
I find the game theory explanation interesting, but isn’t it possible that there’s also a threshold effect coming in here? If two girls have the same mean attractiveness, but one of them has a score distribution like the high stdev examples here, it follows that more people consider her to be really hot than the other girl. This find-her-hot subset would then, I would guess, be much more likely to send her a message; much more so than the other girl, whom most people ‘merely’ rate as cute.
This would probably be easy to check: just see if there’s a correlation between distribution of ‘hot’ votes and messages.
But fascinating as ever – thanks so much for all of these posts.
Why choose to only choose to look at female beauty and the male reaction to it? This isn’t the first post from this blog about female appearance and attractiveness, and as a female user it’s not really something that I’m interested in seeing. OKcupid telling me how being cute is detrimental (when I am often told I’m cute) is not what I need.
Great post!
The “game theory” really rings true.
Can’t wait to see what you find out about men’s photos.
I’m very excited for the male installment of this project. It should be very insightful. Christian, I hope you can take it even further than that though. I would really like to see the homosexual versions of this study.
Wow, that is fascinating. A typical OK Cupid finding: one that is counterintuitive, yet when explained logically, seems to sit well.
I wonder if this concept applies to job interviews. It might be better to have one potential employer rate you as their ideal candidate, and have 9 others hate you, than have everyone place you right in the middle.
Where else does a “high variance” strategy pay off?
Call me terrible, but I do not use the star rating system the way it’s described here at all. On QuickMatch, I go through and rate any girl who I’m interested in messaging later as a 5-star, and any girl who I’m not as a 1-star. It’s a simple sorting system with no grey area whatsoever. I rate TONS of “pretty cute” girls who aren’t my type or who don’t seem well matched to me in their profiles as 1-stars, when in reality I might have thought of them as a 3-star.
Just my two cents.
While your mathematical approach seems logical, you are discounting one huge variable. And it seems to me to be the main variable to why one user gets more messages than another. Let me explain:
The point of a message is what? To potentially get a date correct? And IDEALLY what comes with a date? The “benefits.” I am going to say the potential “benefits” of a date would be the main driver for a guy to send a message to a girl. Thus, the main factor in a guy’s decision making of sending that message would be on the girls seeming “availability.” In other words, as a guy would think “Does girl A seem more likely to respond and date me than girl B.” And if so, I will message the one I think is more open to exploring the “benefits” of going on a date. To put it crudely – “Do i have a greater chance of hooking up with girl A than girl B” or “Does girl A seem more potentially promiscuous than girl B.”
That said, we can somewhat ignore the overall “attractiveness” factor because it would be irrelevant to a certain degree. What may become more relevant (which you have touched upon briefly) would be the type of picture taken, the fashion the individual wears, make-up, type of smile, outfit, tattoos, etc. I would venture that guys hold certain stereotypes to be true, e.g. a girl with tattoos or lots of make-up would be more open to a date and “benefits” than a more “traditional” looking girl of the same “attractiveness.”
In your example of the celebrities: Kristen Bell is a more “classic” cutie or traditionally good looking, while also seeming more of a “traditional” dater in which case the potential “benefits” may not be as likely. Looking at Megan Fox, she is more of an exotic look, which can easily polarize her guy audience with some saying she is very hot and sexy, while others saying she is quite ugly, but perhaps not ugly, just potentially “too untraditional.” Regardless of the overall attractiveness, the argument could be made that most users would message Megan Fox because they would assume their chances of a date and subsequent “benefits” is more likely because of her make-up, tattoos, “sexy” look, etc.
That being said, the next factor becomes the type of guy doing the messaging, a fctor you have left out completely. In order to examine why certain girls get certain amounts of messages based on looks, you also need to take a look at the looks of the guy sending the message. My guess would be, similar to what I pointed out above, that the majority of the messages to the less “traditionally” good looking girl, or the “more available” or “Megan Fox” (read as more potentially promiscuous) would come from average to below average looking/rated guys. While the majority of the messages being sent to the traditional, higher ranked in overall attractiveness (less polarization of votes), the Kristen Bell, would get more messages from the guys that were also seemingly more attractive.
This may have to do with confidence of the guy doing the messaging, where-as they may be thinking they are either “throwing darts” at a dart-board in the hopes a few might stick, versus the guys that are confident that there message may find a positive reply.
In summary, while the above article seems based on good logic, I would put my theory in a more crude sense: The girls that seem (based on make-up, type of picture, tattoos, dress, etc.) more likely to hook up with a wider range of guys (from not-to-very attractive) will get more messages regardless of overall attractiveness, and from a higher number of less-attractive guys. And in fact, the overall more attractive girls will get fewer messages, but messages from more overall attractive guys. It cannot be explained by simple math, unless you take into account WHO is doing the messaging, in which case if I was in need to “throw darts” I would throw them at the dart board in which they seemed more likely to stick. Id also venture to say that the more “serious” guys, or the guys looking for a real relationship, would be messaging the Kristen Bells, and not the Megan Fox’s and vice versa.
Hopefully that helps.
You hit the nail on the head at the end, this all has to do with uniqueness. It’s not a knock against “cute” girls, it’s just that if you’re a guy who is really in to blue haired girls with tats, you’re going to message pretty much every girl with blue hair and tatoos because there just aren’t too many of them. Those girls are also more likely to receive the “1” rating from those guys who find unnatural hair color and tats to be a turn-off.
Love the multinomial regression, guys. What were the p-stats on the other terms? You know what would make an interesting twist? Comparing the polarizing effect of attractiveness to messages to which women actually respond. Is a woman more likely to respond to people that rate her a 3, or 4, or 5?
Actually, that could be a post in and of itself. Which first m-to-f messages get the best response rate…long vs. short, how well he rated her, etc. Controlling for attractiveness, of course.
Nice to see yall doing interesting things with the wealth of info. I’m jealous of your dataset! Keep it coming!
As many people have pointed out — and even more pointed out in response to other blog posts — the star ratings don’t necessarily correlate with physical attractiveness. No matter how hot a woman is, certain phrases will automatically make her a one-star match for me. Similarly, but less drastically, a fun profile will earn a woman a better rating than her appearance alone. I don’t know how OKC can present this analysis with intellectual honesty. (Also, drowning Chinese babies? Not funny.)
Even putting aside the very valid point that star ratings are also based on profile content, there’s no clear system of what the stars really *mean*. Does one star mean “thanks, but no”, or does it mean “oh god my eyes, where’s the bleach”? Does five stars mean “why yes indeed I would immediately message this person”, or does it reflect a vacuous lustful stare? Two stars is clearly negative, and won’t encourage OKC to pair you up, so what’s the difference between two and one? (For that matter what’s the difference between four and five, when selecting either one sends the person a notification? I guess all this means is I’m too pragmatic with Quickmatch.)
And FWIW I’m old enough not to have a clue who Megan Fox is, but based on her picture here I could call her ‘hot’ but not ‘attractive’ since I know we wouldn’t have anything to do with each other.
I am not sure about the game-theoretic explanation. If what determines whether you’ll email someone is a threshold function (personal rating > 4, let’s say), then low variance 4 will get fewer messages than high variance 4, because high variance 4 will go above 4 more frequently.
Other than that, the formula you are using assumes independence between the different star ratings, independence which does not exist. The fact that some star ratings get a negative coefficient can simply mean that the regression algorithms eliminates some of that double counting by assigning some ratings a negative coefficient. The question is whether some star ratings will get a positive or negative score after you residualize the rating based on all other ratings.
Well, now I am desperately wondering which category I fall into!
The sausageparty.com link actually linking to plenty of fish is hilarious!
I loved this finding. You couldn’t have been more right…………….you got it.
Men are that simple! More! More!
Hm… would be interesting if you could do a thing about beards…
When I have one I get more looks from say 15% of girls and another 15% really don’t like it .. but I’m sure I get more attention than when theres no beard and no long hair.
Fascinating study, but like most such studies, it begs for follow-up research.
1. The study treats emails (messages) as a single input, which is fair enough. However, it would be instructive to look at whom those messages are coming from. For example, is there a small subset of men who send out large numbers of messages to women who are either 1s (because of their perceived “easiness”) or 5s, merely blanketing these women in the hopes of finding a casual partner? Do women who score in the “cute” range get emailed by men who send fewer emails in general? And what can we possibly say about the quality of those emails? Are hot or ugly women just plain hit up more for men just looking for a “casual” encounter?
The results would be instructive for women who otherwise might be led to believe that they need to adopt a response (such as emphasizing flaws) in order to attract more emails. But would they be the kind of emails they *want* to receive?
2. Do profiles matter? Does dating intention matter? Let’s assume there are, at root, three kinds of men searching on this site (or rather, three motives driving many men): those looking for a life partner, those looking for women to date (either romantically or platonically, but without the intent of commitment), and those looking for casual sex. If there were some way that women (and men) could better understand what aspects of photos and/or profile could attract more messages in line with what they’re looking for of the three, that would be very useful.
Likewise, is there any correlation between profile length and messages received? Both in brute numbers and in terms of individuality of response (again, using my previous example, the difference between receiving a message from a guy who send out 100s of messages and a guy who sends out relatively few)?
As a highly-trained researcher who has conducted major quantitative and qualitative studies, I can only imagine the riches of the dataset you’ve been able to put together…as well as the data you might be able to collect with a little site tweaking. The holy grail, of course, lies in improving the quality of matching: if you truly help people find better matches, you will have made a major contribution to a lot of lives.
As a woman, I absolutely follow this behavior when it comes to messaging men. If the guy is “universally” good looking, I figure it’s not worth sending him a message because he must be swamped with female attention (which then most likely gives him an enormous, inpenetrable ego). If he’s not a guy I think most women would pick out of a crowd, but I think he’s kind of adorable anyways, I will definitely message him because I feel that I (being about average in attractiveness, I suspect) have a better shot with him. At the same time, if I find a guy ridiculously good looking (but in a non-conventional way), I will say “what the hell” and send him a message. So again, I’m emailing the less attractive (the ones I find truly unattractive are obviously moot), and the most attractive guys, leaving the ones in the middle alone. Now that I see this is a trend, maybe I will change my tactics…
Another possible factor not taken into consideration is the activity level of the girl.
If you want to be ignored, then people will ignore you.
This shows up readily in OKC. Whenever I want to have messages come in, I answer some questions, complete a quiz, or make changes to my profile. Sure enough, more messages arrive.
Id also be interested to see the number of pictures correlated to the number of stars. It’s been my experience that a 4 or 5 star can quickly drop to a 1 or 2 after more pictures are disclosed or vice versa. That may also cause for the variance of 1 stars and 5 stars voting distribution. Also messages sent from said examples might indicate the differences in messages received. Because said user is not as attractive to the over arching population, she may literally not be as attractive and thus send and replies to more messages than the women who is regarded as attractive to the over arching population. A lot of work to be done. Where do I apply?
Annie, right there in the second paragraph: “Men will get their turn under the microscope soon enough.”
This article is a good length. I’d imagine that the results for males differed in some (possibly interesting) way that warrants a similarly-long article on its own. Perhaps you could wait until then before stating that this article doesn’t interest you (a problem which is also solved by you not reading the article).
Or maybe the data for males was not nearly as interesting.
Fascinating–and completely flies in the face of conventional wisdom. All in all a good start on a subject with room for much greater clarification!
Annie, this is an attempt at an objective report. It has nothing to do with whether you “want” to hear it or not. It isn’t about telling you things you want to hear, rather it is about discovering an objective truth.
Now read the end to understand the positive message being laid out for the “merely” cute.
I personally tend to prefer “cute” girls.
I can promise you–PROMISE YOU–that if overweight women started to “play up” their chubbiness, they would see far fewer messages. Piercings and tats may possibly be disliked by some, but they do not carry anything near the social stigma of being fat. Having a “big nose” or “snaggletooth” likewise doesn’t imply some sort of moral deficiency or character flaw the way people (particularly straight men) think being overweight does. I defy you to run your little formulas on overweight versus normal-to-underweight women and come up with the same results. You won’t.
“The Mathematics of Beauty,” should apply to the beauty of both genders. If you want to talk about only women, you should specify in the title. Otherwise, you’re suggesting that men are not beautiful (although it is often used to describe femininity, I consider my boyfriend to be gorgeous), and that their physical attractiveness is not worth analyzing.
Very interesting analysis, but…
Totally totally sexist.
@ Annie – “Fair warning: we’re about to objectify women, big-time. The whole purpose of this blog is to analyze OkCupid’s data, and without a little bit of objectification that’s impossible. Men will get their turn under the microscope soon enough.”
It helps if you read the whole post.
And if you’re coming to a dating site for self-validation, you might want to take a step back and think things over.
Something your formula missed: Did you all account for the fact that the universe of plot points might be biased? For example, if a guy only provides ratings for women he thinks are attractive. There is an inherent, yet subtle, assumption in your calculations that says that guys (or women who like other women) rate women in a fashion that is normally distributed.
If this assumption is false, then the part of your conclusion that says a divergence of opinion is positively correlated with receiving more messages has a hole in it.
Am I off on this?
– Arcenis
As numerous commenters have suggested, messaging may be most strongly determined by when guys think they can get lucky. This explains tattoos generating higher response rates. It also explains the 1-5 splits. Since some men do actually rate on profile quality, a hot woman with a 10 word profile will get a lot of 4’s and 5’s, a lot of 1’s, and a lot of messages. She’ll get few 2’s or 3’s, as well. Controlling for profile length (even binary – says 200+ words vs. not – would be helpful. In general, it is likely that women who seem slutty and shallow will have high message rates and also high 1-star ratings.
Also, the advice at the end of this is ill-conceived. Simply because women with many 1’s get a lot of messages, this does not mean that lowering your attractiveness will get you more messages. I know of several individuals I have ignored messages from because of one highly unflattering photograph.
You STILL fail to reveal your numbers regarding women and how they almost exclusively contact tall men, usually over 6/2.
You take all this time making men look like shallow jerks, but you never turn that unforgiving gaze on how WOMEN behave while using online dating.
Where is the data on women’s activities? What percentage of women ONLY contact men who are taller than 6 feet? How likely is a guy who is 5/6 going to get emails or responses?
You’re leaving 50% of this equation out of your carefully crafted male-bashing “research.”
Annie says: Why choose to only choose to look at female beauty and the male reaction to it? This isn’t the first post from this blog about female appearance and attractiveness, and as a female user it’s not really something that I’m interested in seeing. OKcupid telling me how being cute is detrimental (when I am often told I’m cute) is not what I need.
Joe says: The same reason why people map out the reproductive cycles of a box jellyfish. Because its interesting. As well as that, itd be hard to do a reciprocal study since aforementioned babes rarely email anybody as theyre too busy slogging through their sup-oriented email bombardments.
Thanks for using a pic of “sunny” (first pic, hair dye & excessive makeup). She’s THE single hottest thick girl I’ve ever seen.
Interesting read too.
@annie, the second paragraph of the post says they will be doing the same treatment for men shortly. Perhaps your problem is not being able to read rather than being cute?
I’ve always sort of thought of this as “strip club logic.” I’m no expert, but in general it seems like your theory applies quite well to the strip club environment where most, if not all, of the women are attractive, but some (generally at the opposite ends of the scale) get more attention and thus make more money.
@Annie: Just a guess, but it may have something to do with data set sizes. I can’t imagine that ratings of females by males don’t far outnumber ratings of males by females.
Or, if that’s not satisfactory (which I suppose it might be, since their sample sizes are likely far smaller than their data sets for either sex), I’d be willing to bet that the majority of female users would be plenty interested in seeing this. In fact, if and when OkTrends does come out with a male attractiveness study, I’d be willing to put my money on it getting less than half the views, and thus half the attention, new users, and ad revenue, as this study.
Lastly, it may also be that females’ attraction to males simply cannot be as easily and simply reduced to simple mathematics. Us males being dumb, brutish sex-fiends, we may only have the capacity to consider a few major variables. Y’all may just be much more complicated than us.
I think you guys might be on to something here, but you are clearly distracted from your true purpose which, as everyone knows, is to find me a hot date. What I need is the gaps in my message formula filling in. So far I have 3a^2 + 5b – c = Hot Date where a, b, and c are things she mentioned in her profile. Totes looking forward to your next post. Cheers.
p.s. Can I use that, “this happens a lot in China” line in my next maths paper?
Excellent article.
As the game theory explanation suggests, although 1* ratings are positively correlated with messaging, that certainly doesn’t mean that men who rated 1* are the ones doing the messaging. I’d be interested to see the odds a man messaging a woman given each possible rating.
Isn’t a simpler explanation that the women who have a divergent “hotness” factor is related to something in their profile? Like a cute woman who “hates those Obama lovers” is inclined to incite a certain amount of love and hate, whereas a cute woman who likes to read and snuggle is unlikely to incite neither love nor hate. Maybe the simpler explanation is users are projecting their personality preferences onto attractiveness. The only way your result is accurate is if you asked users for hotness ratings BEFORE they read someone’s profile.
Couldn’t you have also taken into account the type of picture they were featured in? Some girls give innocent looks, some sexy, some dirty, etc. Do you think that could have an effect on what you’ve looked at?
As a user of OkCupid, I feel I should make a personal comment on how I’ve always used the rating system. When I rate a woman, my rating isn’t entirely rated on her looks. I am an athiest, so if I see a very attractive woman, but the info in quickmatch says that she’s a devout christian or catholic, then I’ll put my rating of her down to a one or two. On the flip-side, for an average looking girl who has an amazing taste in music or books, or does a lot of the save sorts of activities as me, I’ll add a star to remind myself that I thought she seemed like a great girl, and I should try to make a connection.
You’re putting a lot of effort into analyzing fundamentally flawed data. You don’t even address the possibility that star ratings don’t correlate completely with appearance. Unfortunately any media outlets that pick this up won’t be the least bit skeptical either, and another myth will enter American life.
“But maybe she’s hot enough for him to throw caution (and grammar) to the wind and send her a message. It’s the curse of being cute.”
I think you meant “…she’s *not* hot enough for him to throw caution (and grammar) to the wind”, no?
I have to agree with Mark (near the begining of these posts). I think in an effort to “not offend the ladies” the star rating system was never labled as a “How Do You Think I Look” and has become (at least in my opinion) a “What Do You Think of Her (Looks+Profile).” So, if you think she’s attractive but something in her profile turned you off (“I like to eat Lutefisk” ..or something) you rate her less than if you knew you were just rating her looks alone. Perhaps there should be a “Your Rating of Their Profile” Star System as well, it might give a completely different picture on… well, their pictures.
As many have already pointed out, this seems flawed due to the fact that people factor profile content into their ratings as well – not just photos.
Annie: They said the men’s turn is coming up. And for what it’s worth, I generally like “merely” cute girls more than hot girls and I know I’m not alone in that.
The psyche of those users who choose to consistently use the star rating system in a consistent way is paramount to your results and not necessarily reflective of all OKC users. Personally, I rate on a combination of looks and words and I only give out 4 or 5 stars. The reasons star ratings are used and how they’re used are as diverse as those who use them. This lack of consistency must affect your results. Also, OKC users who don’t use the star ratings are not represented in your results. There’s a certain kind of person who uses stars consistently and this is the only person your results truly pertain to and, unless you have some method of correction, those results are skewed by other random and inconsistent users.
Also, I would think that your 4/5 star rating notifications would have a significant impact over the breadth of OKC. I don’t rate many women. I rate women mainly in response to being notified that I’ve been given a 4 or 5 star rating. These notifications may skew ratings because of a man’s desire to find out who the rating came from… men would tend to rate women they normally wouldn’t and may rate them higher just to discover the woman’s identity. They would also be more likely to message women who had rated them highly. The effect of these notifications can’t be corrected for and must have some impact on your results.
I’m pretty sure you’re missing the word “not” in the following passage:
“But maybe she’s hot enough for him to throw caution (and grammar) to the wind and send her a message.”
This is one sweeeeeeeet post. I like math, I like game theory, and I like girls. Would read again.
I was thinking the same thing as you, Andrew, until I saw the second comparison of two real users: They the number of 5 ratings they each got was basically the same. The only real difference was the “cute” one got trounced by the “ugly” one.
I definitely look forward to seeing the analysis of women viewing men.
Annie, read the second paragraph:
>> Men will get their turn under the microscope soon enough.
i’m guessing that women’s reactions to male attractiveness in photos is different, hence a different OkTrend post. it would be too much information to jam all together in a single article.
if you’re cute but weren’t aware of cuteness in photos being detrimental, isn’t that something you *do* need to know?
So what you’re saying is that all the cute girls are mine for the taking? Excellent, I fuckin’ love cute girls. Give me a cute girl over hot/sexy/what-have-you any day. Cute > *