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 repliesNo, 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 biasesAccording 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.
This is tragic and eye-opening. It always sucks to see real textbook racism still alive and well.
There is a huge difference between being racist and just not being attracted to people with certain racial characteristics.
Doesn’t necessarily mean it’s racism. I’m a white male myself and I pure and simple am not attracted to women who aren’t white. I like to think I have no biases, but I can tell you for sure, there’s a repulsion based on looks.
I don’t think that it shows racism it shows preference. However Match.com pissed me the hell off. Because it would send me match updates…and I would follow to those profiles and there on the profile it would state the race that they men preferred to date. Maybe 2 of my 12 matches would even prefer to date a black female–but most wanted to date an Asian. Good thing I didnt pay for that site. It’s a site where it already has it’s users make up their mind (or have in mind) about what race they would rather date.
I wish I understood some of the reasons black females get less replies–but I think some of that has to do with stereotypes. I wish people would take the time to get to know me or other black women because they would see how unique each one of us is.
To be fair with regard to the last chart, I don’t know if it is necessarily racist for a white person to say that they would prefer to date a white person. It’s definitely somewhat bigoted in it’s dependency upon stereotypes though. A lot of dating and who a person would consider for relationships is based on social, cultural and economic considerations, and it’s a simple and unfortunate fact that generally speaking whites are at the higher end of the social and economic spectrums. Most people aren’t going to prefer dating someone that they believe is from a social/economic/cultural background that is less well-thought of than their own. It would be interesting if you could parse the data based on level of education, reported income, and geographic location and see if the results varied based on those variables.
I wouldn’t call that racism. They’re preferences; they’re self-selective; they’re private (where’s a match question about how likely you are to TELL someone the answer to a racial question, versus keeping it a secret?); they’re meant to improve your odds at meeting someone you want to date, which is far more personal than most interhuman interactions.
The hope is that you can tell your deepest, darkest, preferences to an algorithm to generate a likely match; you don’t need to prove to okc that you are morally above physical attractiveness and race as far as relationships are concerned, and I don’t think anyone looking for these people would argue that.
Interesting. A few points though.
i) I wonder how strongly the ‘gets messages/doesn’t reply to messages’ factor is. From a quick glance, it seems to be rather strong (women, who recieve more messages as a groupd, reply to about half as many as men do; black women are most likely to respond, and least likely to be responded too; the white male thing). It could be interesting to compare these within groups (ie do black women who get a lot of responses tend to respond as well as most black women, etc…).
ii) In the earlier matrices on this post, it was shown that ‘everybody likes whitey’. I wonder how much of that trickles down to the ‘strongly prefer own skin colour’ box. It would be VERY interesting to see that box with a slightly different question, along the lines of : ‘would you strongly prefer to date somebody of your own (or white) skin colour?’ to see if they’re really open, or just looking for whitey.
PS: Just read Periapt’s comment. Wow. Textbook.
Ouch, no wonder I’m getting no luck or chances here. But persistance is the key right? ……… right?
Whoops, forgot to enter my OKCupid profile link.
Though I answered the second question above with a “No”, I do want to chime in and say white people wanting to bone white people isn’t racism by default (certainly not ‘textbook racism’ whatever that is). I’ve never really been attracted to black women, and I’m assuming if it wasn’t for going to school with a bunch of Mexicans I probably wouldn’t be as attracted to Mexicans as I am. A lot of it has to do with familiarity, I’m assuming there’s a lot of places here in the US where a white person’s chances of being surrounded by non-white women/men on a daily basis is pretty slim. I’m assuming that if I had gone to a school where it was 60% black instead of 60% hispanic, I’d probably be really really into black chicks. As it is, I’m a white guy who likes white girls and Mexican girls, and has never really been into black chicks and can’t even begin to imagine dating an Asian girl. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that I grew up in an area/went to school with a very low population of blacks and Asians.
I think periapt makes a point: do we want to define one’s personal preferences as “-isms”? If so, that means every person of faith (including agnostics) who only want to date within their faith are religious bigots; everyone who has an age range is an ageist, and everyone who wants their partner to be able to put together complete sentences is an intellectual-elitist snob.
Personally, I’m comfortable with that… the fact is the vast majority *are* racists; we *do* discriminate by age, looks, religion, skin color, and a myriad of other factors.
I think the cognitive dissonance people need to deal with lies with the dating-racial-preference match question, and it’s interplay with match scores. As an example, assume a dating racist; they answer that question “yes”, but then they come to the part where they have to decide their match’s answer, and importance. Now, one class of bigot would want their match to answer “yes”, and would rate it as mandatory. In this example, people with strong own-race preferences would match better with people of different races who also have strong own-race preferences… this would account for at least some of the skews shown above.
The more common case, I expect, is a lesser preference, where someone answers “yes” to the dating-racial-preference question, but doesn’t care about their match’s answer. In that scenario, the question ceases to be useful; people of different races who both answer that way will not have their racial preferences affect their match% score.
The obvious solution to this discrepancy would be to retire the “date own race” question and replace it with a set of racially-based preference questions… “do you find yourself attracted to people of X race more or less than average”, or something like that. Then we could see how much people are *actually* lying to themselves about their own racism. Right now, all we’re really establishing is that people have racial preferences and that OkCupid doesn’t include racial preference in ones match% score.
At the risk of stereotyping . . . in an earlier blog entry, you mentioned that text-isms like “ur” and “wat” are big turnoffs. It seems to me that African-American women (can’t speak for the men, since I don’t read their profiles) do this a LOT more in their profiles than other users.
racism: n. Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
(American Heritage Dictionary)
Guess what periapt, you’re racist, and you said it yourself.
You only prefer white women, thus you discriminate against other women purely on the basis of their race.
As long as a culture pretends racism doesn’t exist, isn’t playing a part, or is merely a thing of the past racism will persist and pervade more and more of that culture. Honestly confronting it and identifying it where it lies is the only way to truly move beyond it.
This is pretty amazing. Thanks for being a stats geek! And also, thanks OKCupid for being open with your information.
Thane: you’re telling me I’m not allowed to find non-whites unattractive? Am I not allowed to be repulsed by anyone?
Aesthetic preference does not equal racism. Thanks for playing.
awesome work. please continue these sorts of statistical analyses. as my dear old grandfather used to say, “white, black it doesn’t matter, they’re all pink on the inside.” white women need to ponder such wisdom of the ages.
See, this is the reason that OKC needs a racial preference category and a mechanism that will allow people to search for people who have a preference for their racial group (something none of the other big sites have either, for some reason) so people won’t have to waste their time. If 120 women are in the area of say, an Indian guy, and only 15 are open to dating Indian males and none of them have a high match% with the Indian guy that’s searching, he can know that, instead of crafting 50 emails to women who have a high match percentage and similar interests based on each profile’s contents, receiving 3 “no thank you”s, and assuming it’s because he’s just a f***-up, or some such thing.
As a member of a particularly undesirable racial group, I can say that I’d appreciate being able to see what’s really available for me, instead of fumbling in the dark (OKC) or having to see otherwise desirable candidates that don’t want anything to do with my group romantically over and over and over again until I find the needle in the haystack (every other site that has racial preferences clearly stated).
Also, a high response rate for females may definitely mean that the woman doesn’t have that many messages to manage, but it may also mean that the lack of messages gives her the time to write rejection letters. I know that’s the case with me — high response doesn’t necessarily equal a high level of positive responses. Is there any information about which females are most likely to send first messages?
And because of the overwhelming whiteness of this site, the minorities who come here and stay here are going to be somewhat predisposed to preferring white people over other minorities, sometimes even their own group. And because of this, the site’s demographics will probably be preserved, because minorities looking for minorities who are interested in dating other minorities will leave on the first thing smoking, unless they’ve largely given up on the dating aspect and are just staying for the lulz/hipsters/tests… like me!
I agree with periapt.
I am an Indian guy (and the lowest of the low acc. to these stats). I do not think not responding to someone on basis of their race, for the purpose of a date, is racism.
We all have physical preferences. I see no reason why periapt should not be allowed to have his.
Now, if you were ignoring people for jobs on basis of their race, that would be different.
At least part of black women’s problem is that they are more likely to be overweight than almost every other group (which isn’t true of black men). A lot of us guys just don’t like that.
Just so we’re all on the up and up about things, this is a white not single female speaking. If that matters.
These findings are saddening. It really is, and I don’t want any of my concerns to negate that fact, OK? So just keep that in mind if you’re reading my comment. I really don’t want to upset anyone.
Still – I’d like to know where the “open to it/doesn’t factor in” choice was on that last question, instead of yes or no.
It’s a bit of a leading question: “Would you strongly prefer…” Well no I wouldn’t say strongly. And I would have been open to someone from any background. But when we start using the phrase “strongly prefer,” that to me says it is either sought or avoided, and there’s no middle ground. I know that I’m not secure enough to do that when I can’t read a person’s facial and body language, in addition to their words. And while I wouldn’t avoid a non-white male on the site, strictly based on that, I wouldn’t seek him out, either.
It’s a natural human tendency to gravitate towards the familiar, and most people grow up around people who look like them. I would like to say race wouldn’t matter to me, and out in the live world it probably wouldn’t, but on an online site I don’t know that I would be able to do that. There are too many unknowns that for a skittish person like me, seeing a face that I can really only connect with a handful of experiences and a lot of stereotypes I wish I didn’t know – it is difficult.
An interesting thought… the first boy I ever looked at and thought, wow, he’s cute, was in my chorus class in 5th grade. He was mysterious (in the other 5th grade class!), talented (he could actually sing) and dedicated (he stuck with chorus in 6th grade when it was really uncool and all his friends were cool but he did it anyways). Needless to say, I was a lovestruck little eleven-year-old. It just so happens he was black.
I’m not pointing to this as an “oh look, I can be outside my comfort zone!” because, well, probably most other guys I’ve been attracted to are white. But so was 85% of my schools after 6th grade, and probably 95% of my fellow singers. You do the math.
A racial preference category would not be helpful though. Other studies have shown that if you know that your answer to the racial preference question is going to be visible to other people, then nearly everyone will answer they have no preferences. Okc probably only got as many people to answer that race is important as they did because the answers would be kept secret.
Not being attracted to people of other races does not make you a racist.
Am I a homophobe because I’m not attracted to men? Of course not.
I second Jessie Maims’ suggestion.
These stats show very clearly that OKC must implement a racial preference category. It is hard enough for a guy to craft 50 messages and get 1 response. I rarely send messages myself. But if I were desperately seeking a date, being an Indian guy, I would like to know not to send messages to women who would not respond to me on basis of racial concerns. Given how big the differential is between Indian guys, (or even AA guys) and the rest, I see no justification for not doing this.
I am certain lots of women would appreciate this as well. They get truckloads of messages, and if they can set filters to ignore racially unacceptable guys, it will make their life easier as well.
A dating site is all about maximizing the signal to noise ratio after all.
Wait. What the fuck? Guys reply at a lower rate than females do? Why is it that I always see girls with red lights and guys making threads complaining about girls not replying?
All I know is I’m glad people can see this, because this is something I caught onto a while ago but didn’t want to believe. I almost went as far to conduct my own “experiment” and change my profile photos so I appear Caucasian, but these blog posts saved me the work.
Oh, and bring on the defensive excuses. It’s okay, you’re human too. People think they aren’t so shallow, judgmental, and a bevy of other adjectives that apply to “everyone else,” but not themselves. I’m pretty sure we all suck.
It’s one thing to actually communicate with the person and come to a conclusion—it’s another, well, not to.
Good call on the data mining. okcupid rules.
There’s a song that says everyone’s a little bit racist. And probably for many of us, a certain part finds people of our own race more appealing. But on the other hand, I’ve found that if I look at the people I see every day (admittedly mostly whites), I’ll find about the same percentage of people from each race attractive or unattractive. Maybe it’s just from being multiracial, I don’t know. I think if people really looked deep inside they might realize that race doesn’t matter. We could look at this positively though. If this site had existed say, 40-50 years ago (or even 20 years ago), the results would be much, much worse. People are slowly evolving out of racist ideals. We’re making progress.
…That said, this is still terrible. Many people on here should be ashamed. Especially anyone who claims that interracial marriage is a bad idea. You get a lifetime supply of shame.
I think OkCupid should incorporate this findings to the matching score. Obviously the race is a major factor, and it should take more weight in final matching score. If the girl is not into Asian male, then the matching score with an asian male should not be high enough to motiate the male to email this girl.
I think that it is a quite a stretch to say that just because a person prefers to date someone who is from the same ethnic background, they are racist. I think that is taking it too far. When looking for a potential mate, many people look at a myriad of considerations, just like Greg up there said: cultural, social, economic, and other matters all come into play. Some people look for mates who are very similar to themselves. Not everyone is the same.
I have a hard time making the jump from ‘he/she prefers a partner from the same ethnic group’ to ‘then he/she must be racist’. That is a disconnect I just cannot seem to get over.
Periapt probably has no control over his racial preferences, and most people prefer their own, whether they want to admit it or not.* That being said, guys like periapt and Brad don’t annoy me half as much as people who will say “everyone except black” or “everyone except Asian”, even choosing groups that it’s obvious that they’ve had extremely scant contact with before they’ll choose someone from those two groups.
*However, “repulsed/repulsive” is racist and needlessly insulting language to use to describe your preference, full stop.
“Why is it that I always see girls with red lights and guys making threads complaining about girls not replying?”
Hypocrisy and/or the guys who get lots of messages are not the same guys who complain about girls not replying. Also, in a world where women are inundated with the notion that guys will eagerly respond to any woman that’s kind of attractive, women aren’t going to want to admit that they don’t get responses, and when they do, the thread will consist almost solely of “it’s because you’re ugly/fat/not showing enough tit” instead of helpful ways to change her approach. You may just notice the women with red lights more than the others… that’s probably why they have red lights in the first place.
Our perceptions of beauty (the personal preferences some people are hiding behind here to deny charges of racism) are products of culture. The media keeps telling us over and over and over that whiteness = beauty. Is it that much a surprise that people internalize and believe it without realizing they do and then deny it when it’s pointed out to them?
First of all, I commend you for putting this out there so frankly — and without the clinical bullshit that sometime accompany’s this type of thing. Kudos!!!
I would love to see how this plays out across age cohorts. By decade would be cool. Would you put up a separate age delimited table for people in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and so on?
As an African American man, I can tell you that, your ethnic response analysis matches my experience on line and in life. People make choices and will continue to — but perhaps there is something that you can do so as to waste less of our time. I have a suggestion that might make your otherwise wonderful system more responsive to member choice proclivities — while keeping the spirit open spirit that I find so enjoyable. Just so less of member time is wasted barking up the wrong tree…
Please allow members who REALLY do not want to be approached by members of any specific ethnic or religious groups to configure their preferences so that can be identified — and we can choose to have them NOT not appear in our searches. We do not have to see their choices or ever know how they are configured — unless the member chooses to make them visible. Here is an example of how it might play out. Before anyone gets offended, please note that these choices are for example only. They are an illustration of possible attitudes that some of us less desirable types might prefer to avoid:
For Example: A member can configure their profile so that they (imagine two sections):
In section one: Select an an ethnic group from a check list
In section two: Select a characterization of their interest in interacting with members of that group from a check list.
******************* FOR EXAMPLE ***************************
Section one: Identify a group — Ethnicity = Romulan
Section two: Interaction and relationship choices vis-a-vis the selected ethnic group:
I will not date them
I would be uncomfortable if my friends knew I dated one
I might let one take me out but I’d certainly never fuck them
I’d date one if things were slow, but would probably dump them once things picked up
I fucked one in college, isn’t that enough?
I’ll fuck anything with a 8-figures + in the bank, but no broke SOB’s please
The combination of a section 1 and a section 2 selection = 1 filter. Allow the member to complete as many of these filters as they like to characterize their interests. On the other side of the coin, for those of us who don’t want to squire about people who view us as a booby prize, allow us to make the following choices
Never present me with the profile of anyone who has indicated the selected options below for members of my ethnic group
A___
B___
C___
Never present me with the profile of anyone who has indicated the selected options below for members of any ethnic group
A___
B___
C___
I’m sure you can refine this into something that would work. A similar tool could be applied to religious groups or income brackets or any other options that are the basis of discrimination. The main objective is to limit mutual exposure to a known waste of time based on these somewhat emotionally charged issues. Seeing how there are only so many hours in a day, I would really prefer it if you could help keep those individuals out of my face and me out of theirs
Cheers
“Other studies have shown that if you know that your answer to the racial preference question is going to be visible to other people, then nearly everyone will answer they have no preferences.”
This is probably so they’ll look like more attractive and open-minded candidates… to other people of their own race. lol. That kind of rampant BSing is why people often aren’t believed when they bring this up independently — because they’re the only ones that feel the invisible wall. Hm… perhaps something can be done where the filter isn’t public, but is there, and interested parties can search based on it — I don’t think that many white guys will be working that hard to figure out if the white woman they’re interested in shuns Latinos, but it would definitely help out Latin guys if they could immediately know that she and other women with her preferences are out of the running once the filter is turned on.
People shouldn’t conflate “racism” with “bigotry”. These numbers indicate a high degree of racism, but not an explicitly malevolent or conscious driving force behind it. The vast majority of human history has been founded on clannish tribal identities, and believing that just because we have the Internet and college educations and iPhones and crap means we’re suddenly above that subconscious history is flat out dumb.
However that doesn’t make it acceptable. Claiming that you do not like people with certain ethnic features is the freaking textbook definition of racism and people need to face it.
I always love when I come across this type of research and polls that once again reveal that lots of people are racist. Yet people will always deny it and find excuses. At least now people have moved on from the “One of my best friends is black.” excuse.
Some people need to just accept that they are full of racial bias and actively discriminate against certain races. After accepting that maybe then they can begin to consciously do something about the snap judgments their mind creates.
For anyone who knows they don’t particularly like a certain race, I would say give it a go anyway. If it’s possible ignore the race and actually get to know the person. One of my favorite sayings is “You don’t love someone because they’re beautiful, they’re beautiful because you love them.”
But for now I would also second the idea of a people being able to select racial preferences and being able to search by that. Not that it would help all that much since people will still lie in those too.
“And we can choose to have them NOT not appear in our searches.”
I can’t overemphasize how important a part of any institution of racial preference information this would be. With the current search methods, they can choose not to see me, and that’s fine. All I want is the choice to not see them, either.
PS…
You might want to consider discounting a premium membership for anyone who can prove that they’ve fucked at least 3-people from an alternate ethnic group in the past 30-days.
Other “guess who I fucked last month” prize options might include:
Toaster Oven
Stake Knives
Discount on the hourly rate at a drive through hotel
Free super size upgrade
AA batteries
Last week’s news paper
Condoms
WHITE GUILT WHITE GUILT
Let people be with who they want to be with! It’s not a crime to choose who you love!
It’s none of your business who people are sexually attracted to–white, black, asian, male, female, gay, straight, bisexual.
LIVE AND LET LIVE.
Is “preferring white women” really substantively different than “preferring blondes” or “preferring women”?
We accept that it’s ok to be straight or gay, despite the fact that it is clearly “sexist”. It’s alright for a 20-year-old to reject the advances of a 60-year-old purely on the basis of his age, though doing so in a job interview would be illegal. It’s alright to discriminate against our potential dates based on their looks, or income, or any other random physical or cultural characteristics.
What is “ethnicity” apart from one’s physical and cultural make-up?
Why should it not be acceptable for a white male to prefer to date a white female? I’m not suggesting that we *as a society* should look down on interracial couples, but allowing everyone to follow their passions is quite a bit different from expecting everyone’s passions to be egalitarian.
The very notion that one ought to respond to dating proposals without reference to the candidate’s body or culture is absurd.
This blog is fascinating. Keep it up.
Has it occurred to anyone that the possibility of raising mixed-race children is difficult for everyone involved?
“For anyone who knows they don’t particularly like a certain race, I would say give it a go anyway.”
Don’t do this, ya’ll. I can’t speak for all minorities, but I don’t want to be anyone’s guinea pig, object of penance or free pass (ala, “but I dated a _____”). I don’t need “a chance” to prove my romantic worth despite my race. If someone can’t see it with my race, they need to go find someone they can stand. I’d rather be profoundly alone than suffer that indignity.
Online dating or Internet Dating is a system that is open to individuals, couples and groups meet online and possibly develop a social relationship, romantic or sexual. These dating services allow customers to provide personal data, and search for matches, using criteria such as age, sex and location. Members can upload photos and browse photos of others. These also offer additional services such as web casts, chats and message boards. Many people can sign up for free but they can also offer services that require a monthly fee. Most of these areas are broadly based; with members from diverse backgrounds have different types of relationships. Other sites are more specific, desired to restore a specific area, based on the type of members, interests, location, or relationship.
The attraction of online dating seems like anonymity of providing these services. When you’re looking for a date in real time is an issue dating services online is proving very useful. Online dating services saves time, because it can act as a filter before meeting someone. The Advantages of online dating is that participants choose the person they are interacting. Although online dating has had the opportunity to new people from around the world, the distance may also prove to be a problem. In dating online, the choice is to search for possible dates, have the same interest, religion, place, personality and status of the subscriber.
It has been projected that around 1 out of 5 Americans take part in an online dating service.
This is pointless. Black males don’t get responses from anyone. Maybe they just send stupid messages. Maybe look into how your race affects the stupidity of your messages. That would be more interesting…
Upon first reading this post I was ready to decry the continuing role of racism in our society. Before throwing up my arms and cursing the modern world, however, I decided it would be wise to take a moment to think more deeply about the analysis presented. I’m concerned that there are confounding variables in these statistics. Here’s why:
For the sake of argument say that no one race is, in the aggregate, more desirable than any other. Nevertheless, OKCupid might not attract equally desirable users from each race. For example, it may not be that black women are less desirable (as the results above appear to indicate) so much as less desirable black women join OKCupid. Although the size of OKCupid’s user base seems to suggest that it might be at least partially immune to this effect (a classic case of voluntary response survey bias, incidentally), this is not necessarily so.
I see two major reasons why one might expect some (perhaps much) response bias in OKCupid’s data. First off, although online dating has come a long way toward mainstream acceptance in recent years, participation still carries at least a small social stigma. This lack of respect for online dating and those who participate in it might not be equal among races (classes, religions, geographies, etc.). The less regard a group has for online dating, the more desperate (and thus less desirable) a member of that group would have to be to join OKCupid. Simply put, if a group likes online dating less, the online dating community will, on average, like participating members of that group less.
Secondly, it may be that certain groups have more efficient real-world matchmaking mechanisms. If a group is better at pairing off its most desirable members, it will be represented online by a correspondingly less-attractive contingent. One might say that matchmaking mechanisms should be primarily geographic and not racial, but the reality of our society is that racial (class) groupings are in general extremely insular even when they overlap geographically.
Before closing this comment, it is worth pausing to address the most natural objection to the arguments I’ve presented. Hold on a second, one might say, weren’t the results described in the blog post controlled for match percentage and picture attractiveness? Sure they were, but the real story here is that those factors are not good explainers of response rate for most messages (and thus not a good overall measure of a user’s desirability). Looking at the response rate vs. match percentage figure, it seems from the noise level that users (unsurprisingly) don’t send many messages to people who match them less than 40%. From 40%-95%, where most of the messaging on OKCupid seems to occur, the correlation between match percentage and response rate is much weaker. In fact, there is no observed correlation between 60% and 95%. It is also quite telling that the 35% response rate for 60%-95% matching users is only slightly greater than the 32% average rate reported in a previous oktrends post. I can’t comment on the role of picture attractiveness since the OKCupid staff have not made any data available, but my hunch is that it will explain some but not all of the observed response rate. The punchline here is that there is plenty of room for other non-racial factors that correlate strongly with response rate (desirability) but that have not been controlled in this analysis. If there is even one hidden variable that correlates with response rate, that variable could be subject to the selection pressures I’ve discussed in the previous paragraphs. Accordingly the coupling between the hidden variable and response bias could create the illusion of racism where none exists. This is not to say that there is no racism on OKCupid; my point is simply that its presence hasn’t been proven yet.
I think some people are missing the point. Responding to a message is not tying the knot. A reply is not a bind to have sex with the person or even meet the person at all.
This entire analysis and conversation would be totally unnecessary if OKC had an ethnicity preference option. I have basically given up on finding the “needle in the haystack”…it’s exhausting and discouraging and I only sign in if I get contacted by a female sender. The bottom line is, it would mean less members for OKC. The fear is, the minorities would quickly sort through the perhaps limited options and realize there is no need to remain a member…fewer members, less value for attracting advertising dollars. OKC, instead of investing time to create such an analysis, do yourself a favor and create a more efficient experience for your subscribers (especially for minorities) ….create the ethnicity option and make everyone’s life easier…both senders and receivers of all ethnicities.
Very interesting data. I wonder how matching of genetic material (& respective pheremones) looks across races.
I know it won’t be as interesting, but PLEASE do an exposé on height & body type!
Wow, would think after 10,000 years of walking on 2 feet, harnessing nature to supply our needs, 2 world wars, and now approaching the 4000th year of large organized civilizations, we’d be closer to the end of everything racial….
……but then again, Bush was a president, people know and actually care more about celebritys then they’re children, and religion, I think we can call what we’ve got so far very good progress.
I’m with KevinV and periapt on this one.
I find that the vast majority of black and Native American women who I come across on dating websites do not appeal to me, physically. I haven’t noticed any other trends in my own physical dislikes, but this is by no means racism. I didn’t say that I find ALL black or Native American women unattractive, as there are a few that I have found attractive. I’m not turned off by the simple detail of their heritage. It’s just a simple preference.
In the opposite direction, I was rather surprised once when I told a Chinese friend of mine that one of his female friends was absolutely gorgeous, just to have him reply, “meh, she’s okay.” :-O
What about message sending volume?
You are computing the overall match %, but not the match % average of the recipients.
I would like to see a couple of charts:
1) The std deviation of match percentage for message recipients, by race (for instance, do white males tend to send messages only to people within x percentage points)..
2) The message *volume* as messages per person sent by each race to each other race, adjusted for the recipients percentage of the site.
I think these two things might shed some more light on what is going on.