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

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

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

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

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

The sentence says so far, meaning so far in the article. “The four lists we’ve seen so far.” So far in the article. Like, so far in terms of the article. So far: from the top of the article until that point. I don’t understand why people can’t put this together.
Thom Goodsell says:
““Finally, it’s worth noting that OF THE FOUR LISTS WE’VE SEEN SO FAR black women’s is the only one to explicitly include someone of another race: Justin Timberlake.”
No. Latinas also explicitly include someone of another race. Alicia Keys is black. And not Black Latina. Just black (and white, but definitely not Latina).
Just sayin’”
Reading comprehension… you must be a protestant.
Just sayin’
There are no data on multi-racial people because they do not fit the convenient stereotypes presented here. It would be too complex, especially since mixed races represent the future of humanity. It will take a while, but one day we’ll all be mutts!
This survey analysis shows that this sample of people are generally uneducated and shallow. It must be easy at OKC to find like-minded simpletons to hook up with…
I’m cool and I fucking love eating sashimi while listening to merengue!
I have to agree with Dr. Char here. While the data is interesting, it is not representative of any generalized racial population. One thing that is completely absent from the analysis is any mention of geographical distribution of the sample population. Generalizing the cultural traits of entire races without respect to location can be extremely misleading. Assuming that a white man from rural Alabama will list the same interests as a white man from Manhattan is not quite right in the first place, but if the sample is not evenly distributed throughout space the results will be skewed towards the areas with the highest number of sampled users (which I suspect may be the case due to the prominence of Red Sox in white males and females). Adding a spatial component would clarify these results and potentially point out any geographic biases.
I like both Phish and Outkast. I must be mulato.
i thought this was pretty interesting
I agree with DrCHAR’s comment below. Among other things he notes:
>> it should be noted that the cohort was based solely on people claiming to be single and actively seeking a relationship
I’d like to add… it’s a FREE website for that purpose. The group of people sampled is likely to be particularly poor or particularly cheap. So…. the groups that rank highly on reading level here may also just be groups that tend to be have good educations but be cheap (have a choice and choose okcupid), whereas groups that rank lower may just be groups that tend to be poorer/less educated (have no choice but okcupid).
Plus, sure wish there were some error bars…
this is the one underlying factor that okcupid offers that many other websites DO NOT. REALITY and through processing of statistics. as a sr level chemical engineer i know what im talking about. the “keyword” for white male america is so correct. “frat” or fraternity is key. i am a mixed race african american that appears native american and i tell you you can see this “frat” mentality in the hiring practices and work environment. go get you a brew biff and hit the golf course! lol. tragic really. they have the same frat boy mentality in making executive decisions as well. and people wonder why corporate america is so FUCKED. just thing about eng 101 with frat boy timmy in the back row drunk and talking shit. now imagine him now, same personality only president of operations. then you will understand!
Your graph’s captions are wrong. The Coleman-Liau Index does not measure “writing proficiency level:” it measures, sort of, readability—- two totally different things.
The correlation between religion and writing proficiency is interesting. What’s ironic, though, are the atheists who imply some sort of causation; making that kind of a logical fallacy kind of takes away from their argument of intellectual superiority…
Guys, this is quite pathetic. I can appreciate the identification of stereotypes but I don’t think you guys do a good job of expressing the fact that these are JUST that, stereotypes. As a black American I am offended on a daily basis by these very stereotypes. More specifically, try living in a Chinese country as a black man. People where I live don’t learn. No matter what, they walk by the truth of “White is right”. Far too difficult to explain.
EXCELLENT work, Christian! But I would like to see a historgram of the ages of the people whose profiles you sampled, or some kind of age distribution.
DrCHAR
Thank you for explaining that not everyone is the same. I was about to chide you for wittering on about the blitheringly obvious, but then I thought better. After all, not everyone reading will be adult, or educated.
Then again, you made a right meal of stating some fairly simple points. So yeah, I’m chiding you now. Silly… petulant… silly…
C.
Well I guess there’s not point in denying that I’m an uncle (aunt) Tom(ette) anymore.
Of course everyone tells the truth on dating sites.
Ha! Hilarious. Great visuals too. I’m a data person by profession and I have no complaints.
And thanks for opening my mind more to Asian men who seem the coolest of the bunch.
sabian vox:
I couldn’t agree with you more. You’ve hit the nail on the head with your post about “frat mentality”. I’ve worked in the corporate world for many years, and I’ve seen the SAME exact thing. Very unfortunate.
I found it interesting that Latinas listed “Terrified of” and “Scary movies.” Would this indicate that they’re fightened a lot, but that they don’t really mind it?
All I see is another article implying that India is not in Asia…
I wonder if it shows racism that you noted that asian men identify countries (as opposed to women) but not that hispanic men also do (and at a higher rate?) whereas hispanic women don’t.
also, were there no native americans in this sample?
overall, awesome article (as always).
it would be interesting to see the commonalities too. What terms were most popular and least corellated with race? By itself that would probably be less interesting than this article, but taken together I think it might add further insight.
I find it interesting that Native Americans/First Nations People were not discussed. Aren’t there any/ enough of this group using okcupid to report about? More info please. AND, age demographics are indeed needed.
Yeah, Coleman-Liau is a really misleading metric. Hemingway would come off looking bad by it. Seems like a better measurement of writing skill would be to check the number of spelling and simple grammatical errors. Or even capitalization.
It’s all dead numbers. Doesn’t apply to us mutants anyway.
Can somebody tell oktrends that it would be nice to have a link back to okcupid after I’ve finished reading their article?
Damn fucking straight
OMG! It’s an actual article making rational racial comparisons without bigoted motivations or divisive backlash. This may be the first indication I’ve seen that our popular culture can begin to get over the naive need to homogenize our races.
Props to OKCupid for having the balls to be a leader.
Nice article! ^_^ I LIKE EVERYTHING, SO I GUESS I’M FROM NOWHERE XD
I’m embarassed that the three major things that blacks liked or identify themselves with were 1. Religion 2. Sports 3. Music. It’s not a sterotype, it’s just plain true what black Americans feel.
I have to say this is interesting, especially when you have the commercials out there stating that Asians and pacific islanders are two of the races that have the highest levels of hiding that they have hiv or aids or stds, and out of ALL of the groups that had the analysts done with. Pacific Islander males were there ONLY ones that mentioned swingers enough times to be placed on the lists. And it was #11 to boot.
I noticed that sports and fitness-related activities took up a lot of black men’s mindsets. Which makes sense. If you’re gonna be tossing around a bunch of fat white chicks in the sack, you should probably be in shape.
the one chart that would be impossible to collect, but which would put this all into better perspective, would be “stuff okcupid users like vs. stuff everybody else likes.”
These stats are completely in line with my observation of the general public.
Except for the collapsed lists, because I know too few people of those races to have made any broad observations.
Fun to read!
OK Fucking Trends! …Nah, doesn’t work, but still nearly as awesome as Van Halen.
Steve von Mass is right. The picture drawn by this report is a cross section of the widest part of society. Many (but not most) people will not relate to a lot of the items in a single profile. I wrote down what I related to with each profile and I got a potpourri of things I identified with. People should keep in mind, especially if they are about to get upset, that statistics only describes large amounts of data. It doesn’t tell the story of every individual element.
Ethan-Anthony:
You might want to look up the definition of a stereotype. This is a graph of collected data, nothing more. Stop feeling sorry for yourself for a minute and you’ll realize not EVERYONE is out to apply hurtful stereotypes.
Very interesting, keep the data coming. I would like to see bar and whisker plots, or more of anything that demonstrates the distribution of the data.
Shame on those offended by this. These observations give us insight into the online dating population of OKCupid and how they want to represent themselves in this domain/context. Every inference past that point is just speculation and nothing more.
I’d love to see the religious groups broken down with a finer granularity. Episcopalians are quite different from the general “protestant” population as far as education levels go. I’m sure other religious groups could stand to be broken out separately as well. I think the results would be far more informative.
this article was so wonder, i made a happy poopoo
Wow, props for having the balls to approach a taboo subject, even though you had the data to back it up. I think this is a *really* interesting exploration, but I do hope no one uses it in order to be racist against people. I find it mostly as interesting.
P.S. I am a white person and I am now kind of embarrassed of my like-raced peers. But most of that is just because I don’t fit in and don’t want to.
We all know the stereotypes. This is nothing new. How about an article on the ones that don’t fit those catergories? Maybe a story about the individual on okcupid so people have something concrete to judge off of or relate to.
Two problems with the data:
1) No controls. If you find trends along racial lines, a good control would be to try to find trends along something you wouldn’t expect there to be trends in, say height. Maybe look at responses among everyone under 5′ or over 5′. Whatever. The lack of controls fails to answer the question “Would I find a typological trend no matter what random variable I used to categorize people with?” If you find trends based on race, religion, language but not based on height, body type, or something else, then maybe you can make some sociological interpretations. However, if you also find that no matter what random category you choose, you find a trend, then it’s hard to make any claims about anything.
2) No error bars on graphs. This is essential.
Lindsey wrote: “…I always knew atheists were the smartest group”
Uh, not quite. I’m a Buddhist, but not very serious about it
yes yes. so we all know that categorizing people by ‘race’ is inaccurate and, at the very least, wrong. but there are practical, social groupings that are reflected in this analysis here, that is derived out of geo-locatable factors. It is a very interesting look at the way people self-identify and construct their identity on this internet dating site. Of course, ‘what4′, you aren’t being represented, it was taken off a dating site. It’s not generalizable to the broader population, and it doesn’t strike me as though Christian is making such a claim.
Just as a side note, it appears to me that literacy is measured higher in indian and asian populations (or people with self-identified ancestry from these countries, who had the socio-economic standing to immigrate) because of the socio-economic determining factors in having internet access (and speaking english) in these countries at all, as compared to the more generalized access available in the western world. Controlling for that, there would be no difference.
Religiosity correlates with race and writing level and race and writing level correlate. Thus these correlations are meaningless. A more interesting comparison would be the correlation between writing level and religiosity within each race or the comparison of writing level and race for each degree of religiosity. It would also be useful to know the age distribution of each group.
These aren’t stereotypes, unless we enter into some argument about whether a dominant culture influences people to stereotype themselves or something. Obviously this reflects cultural differences. It’s just an analysis of words people use to describe themselves. And in my experience, is broadly true. Of course not everyone fits. But come on, white chicks and yoga and that damned nicholas sparks? Black americans and religion?!?
I’m pretty sure Alicia Keys made the Asian woman list (and possible Indian as well)…she is a multicultural HIT!
And come on white girls…Diet Coke as something specific you like on an OK Cupid profile? WTF. Get it together and go eat some food…
This is hilarious.
AWESOME!!! very creative. shows how words and phrases taken out of context can have great meaning. I found especially interesting the white and asian stereotypes and how they apply almost 100% to my Vietnamese-born, US-raised husband. Van F*ck*ng Halen all the way!
I am atheist and I consider myself to be well above average intelligence. I also do not post my religious (or political) views on any sort of profile. Just because you’re smart and Christian and do not post your views on profiles does not mean you can possibly justify saying most other Christians are like you, while people of other beliefs are not. That’s crazy. There are people of all beliefs, of varying range of intelligence that make different decisions on whether or not to post their views. Keep in mind this is averages based on very rough data, it’s not talking about you specifically so don’t get too offended.
Want to know whats a more plausible reason for Christians scoring low in writing level? There’s a hell of a lot more of them! It is the largest religion in the world, followed by Islam, then non-religious (including both atheist and agnostic). Atheism is somewhat newer as a belief (not really, but at such a large scale yes). Its the same as when protestant religions started and were a newer than Catholicism. And as such, a lot of atheists are such because they have taken the time to think about their own views and rested on being atheist (granted there’s a lot of dumb ass ones too). Where as with Christianity(as well as Islam, the other big one), yes you still have people who take the time to figure out their own beliefs, but you also end up with all of those people who don’t think about it and accept what their parents tell them regardless of what that is. Generally I would assume (as I have no presentable evidence to back this up) that people who take the time to decide their beliefs are, are smarter than those who don’t. So as a crude example of what I’m saying, pretend you have 100 Christians, 20 of them really think about their beliefs, 10 of those settle on Christianity as the right answer and 10 rest on atheism. The other 80 are the people who don’t care and are somewhat less intelligent in SOME sense, and therefore have lower writing proficiency (I’m reaching here I know). They end up being Christian based entirely on the fact that that’s what they were told as children. Now, you have 20 atheist, and 4 of them think about it, 2 resting on Christianity and 2 resting on Atheism, other 16 being ‘dumb’ followers of their parents blah blah blah… Now you have 12 smart atheists out of 26, and 12 smart Christians out of 94 right? So on average atheists are smarter. Only because more people are Christian to begin with, and there’s a lot of dumb people out there.
If you took all the people who actually thought seriously about all belief systems before resting on the one that made the most sense for them (whether it be the same or different from what they were taught as a child) I would assume that their writing level and intelligence and everything would be comparable across all beliefs. So Christians get the short end of the stick in the sense that your stuck with a bunch of dumb people, just because your somewhat the ‘default’ for people in North America.
This is of course a very VERY rough explanation for the point I am trying to make, but you can see where I’m going with this. This would also explain some of the other religions scoring higher too. Yes they’ve existed for a long time, but not in North America to any great extent, so you get a lot of them being people that have ‘crossed-over’ from another religion. You also get people immigrating from poorer countries, and they must have done quite well to be able to make it here and as such I assume they would have high writing proficiency…
ONE FINAL THOUGHT
There is always the possibility that this data is grossly skewed in any which way. And that we are all over analyzing this way too much.
You all can whine all you want about how innacurate this assessment is, but it’s obvious you’re just pissed cuz athiests once again demonstrated in a small way that they are sharper than Christians. Every time I see something like this I jizz in my pants a little, imagining how pissed you bible thumping fanatics get.
Don’t trust these stats if you don’t want to. Do a profile search on “Christianity” and just read how poorly written many of those profiles are compared to “atheism”. You should be able to convince yourself within ten minutes or so. Is really so surprising to you that a practice that has always condemned science and reality makes its followers more retarded?
I think people are getting upset about these word compilations because they paint a picture of each race/gender combo that is either a) reductive, or b) a confirmation of stereotypes.
Remember, though, these aren’t the most common words that show up in people’s profiles, they are, “the words and phrases that made each racial group’s essays statistically distinct from the others.” So, by nature, it’s going to be a divisive list. These aren’t the words and phrases that we share in common, the things that bring us together, or the things we love most. These are the things that separate us. These are the little engines that drive stereotyping and cultural misunderstanding while also giving each group it’s own bit of flavor.
So, if you look at those lists and think they are a summation of that race/gender group, I think you’re taking away the wrong message. Personally, I thought of my friend’s profile here (for the record, I’m a white man and she’s a black woman). Our likes are 95% the same, but under movies I list The Big Lebowski, and she lists Soul Food. Crazy.