The REAL ‘Stuff White People Like’

September 8th, 2010 by Christian Rudder

What is it that makes a culture unique? How are whites, blacks, Asians, or whoever different from everybody else? What tastes, interests, and concepts define an ethnic group? And is there any way to make fun of other races in public and get away with it?

These are big questions, and here's how we answered them.

We selected 526,000 OkCupid users at random and divided them into groups by their (self-stated) race. We then took all these people's profile essays (280 million words in total!) and isolated the words and phrases that made each racial group's essays statistically distinct from the others'.

For instance, it turns out that all kinds of people list sushi as one of their favorite foods. But Asians are the only group who also list sashimi; it's a racial outlier. Similarly, as we shall see, black people are 20 times more likely than everyone else to mention soul food, whereas no foods are distinct for white people, unless you count diet coke.

Using this kind of analysis, we were able find the interests, hobbies, tastes, and self-descriptions that are specially important to each racial group, as determined by the words of the group itself. The information in this article is not our opinion. It's data, aggregated from the essays of half a million real people.

So here's the real stuff white people like.

Click on the icons to toggle between men/women.

In general, I won't comment too much on these lists, because the whole point of this piece is to let the groups speak for themselves, but I have to say that the mind of the white man is the world's greatest sausagefest. Unless you're counting Queens of the Stone Age, there is not even one vaguely feminine thing on his list, and as far as broad categories go we have: sweaty guitar rock, bro-on-bro comedies, things with engines, and dystopias.

As for the interests of white women, you have romance novels, some country music, and a broad selection of Good Housekeeping type stuff. It's also amazing the extent to which their list shows a pastoral or rural self-mythology: bonfires, boating, horseback riding, thunderstorms. I remind you that OkCupid's user base is almost all in large cities, where to one degree or another, if you find yourself doing much of any of these things, civilization has come to an end.

If I had to choose over-arching themes for white people's lists, for men, I'd go with "frat house" and for women, "escapism." Whether one begot the other is a question I'll leave to the reader.

Stuff black people like.

Hopefully it's been obvious that the font-size of a phrase indicates the relative frequency with which it appears. So, toggling between black men and black women above, you can see that while soul food is important to both, it's really, really important to the women. In fact, soul food and black women is the single strongest phrase/group pair we found.

The above lists also make it clear that, regardless of whether Jesus himself was black, his most vocal followers definitely are. Religious expressions weren't among the top phrases for any of the other races, but they're all over the place for black men and (especially) black women, for whom 13 of the top 50 phrases are religious. Black people are more than twice as likely than average to mention their faith in their profiles.

Finally, it's worth noting that of the four lists we've seen so far, black women's is the only one to explicitly include someone of another race: Justin Timberlake.

Double finally, how bold is it that I am cool is the second most typical phrase for black men?

OkTrends Racial Stereotype #1

In the course of researching this article and, in particular, comparing white guys to black guys, a handy shortcut occurred to me:

If you're trying to figure out if white dudes like something, put fucking in the middle, and say it out loud. If it sounds totally badass, white dudes probably love it. Let's see this principle in practice:

Stuff Latinos like.

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

OkTrends Racial Stereotype #2

El chiste de knock-knock:

Latinas' interests are fairly typical for a dating site: you got friends, career, education, movies, music, a few physical details, and, oh yeah...morbid fear. We dug further into I'm terrified of (on their list at #42) and found which words typically came next. It's mostly insects and "the dark", though one expert tautologist is "terrified of being scared" and another woman is "terrified of Martians."

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

Stuff Asians like.

As you can see, both Asian men and women choose I'm simple as their go-to self-description. Contrast this to black men's I am cool and Latinos' I'm a funny guy. It's also interesting that Asian men very often mention their specific heritage (taiwan, korea, singapore, vietnam, china) while Asian women don't.

OkTrends Racial Stereotype #3

Combing through these lists, you can see the different ways women use cosmetics:

  • White women show off their eyes (mascara is #5 on their list).
  • Black women show off their lips (lip gloss, #7).
  • Latinas show off both (mascara, #18 / lip gloss, #22).
  • Asian women, however, show off their practicality (lip balm, #48).
. . .

So far, I've gone through racial groups in order of their prominence on OkCupid. For brevity (I know this is the internet), I'll present the remaining lists without foolish commentary. You can click any of the links to reveal them inline.

Stuff Indians like...
Stuff Middle Easterners like...
Stuff Pacific Islanders like...

Sidenote: reading level

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

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

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

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

. . .

We'll be revisiting race later this month, with a statistical investigation of interracial dating, and we're almost finished with the article on (bi-)sexuality we promised last time. Thanks for reading, everyone.

Till next time,

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

  1. kimtsstchr says:

    Could we see (and take) the same survey you gave to subscribers to compare with the compiled results you provided?

  2. kal-el says:

    The funniest thing about the stats is that no matter how you group people everyone is looking and not finding, maybe all of us should just play spin the bottle

  3. Teri B says:

    I hope in reading these lists, people remember that stuff that was mentioned frequently and commonly across ALL lists was edited out. So there are probably plenty of things all these racial groups like (and that may even comprise most of any single user’s personal interests) that are simply not presented here.

  4. clockwork unicornge says:

    @tom davidson

    ALICIA FUCKING KEYS
    FOR FUCKING EVAR

    hell yeah.

  5. wimac says:

    Well it certainly was interesting, but not surprising. Most people remain firmly attached to what they grew up with, and it doesn’t change much as you get older, we take comfort in what we’re familiar with…..

    Most of the stuff on the Black Peoples list wouldnt show up on mine, god I love being an outlier.. now that’s damn cool,,can you dig it??

  6. Guy says:

    “this is ridiculous. only an idiot would care either way. your racists”

    You are.

  7. Terijian says:

    So I know we’re dwindling, but did i miss a memo? I guess my race actually doesnt exist anymore. huh.

  8. Curvasian says:

    Some stuff Middle Eastern men like:

    The Sopranos
    my physique
    electronic music

    Sounds a bit Jersey Shore to me.

  9. Mar says:

    I would like to see how members of my religion, the Baha’i Faith, compare on some of these categories. The faith puts a strong emphasis on education, especially the education of women. Unfortunately on O.K Cupid there are limited choices of religion, so I am lumped into the “other” category. “Other” always piques my curiosity on a profile.
    Now I just want to eat noodles and listen to Alicia Keyes while reading a Tom Clancy novel.

  10. aliking says:

    Well this is just fascinating. Looking forward to more.

    To any Pacific Island males listing “I hope they serve beer in Hell” on their profiles – is that really working out?

  11. LittleKandiRav3r says:

    Dude! this is bs! How can this people talk about latinas in that way. Lmao it’s not true at all. I mean Dominicans, we are different than boricuas, cubans, mexicans. Dominicans: We know what we want, We have no fear, We are straight up…If I gotta tell you something, I’ll tell you on your face. Why? bc we keep it real. We definitely love having a blast, dancing, meeting new people, we are hard workers, we have a good head on our shoulders. WHOEVER WROTE THIS! GO TO DR, LEARN ABOUT MY CULTURE, HAVE FUN AND THEN COMPARE. Anywho… If you haven’t dated a latina you should definitely do it and let’s see if you gonna say the same. No fear papi! Latinas keep it real!

  12. Eileen Burke says:

    Large city-ite here. We’re kind of famous for boating. We have horseback riding–our police just stopped riding them a few years ago. We have thunderstorms. We have a several-thousand acre park with miles of bike trails. For bonfires you may need a nearby high school.

  13. Talyn says:

    I realize that most people who claim to be native american are white people who have some alleged great-grandmother who was a Cherokee or whatever. They’re attempting to appease some kind of white guilt. Pretty much any american indian you’ll find on the internet is a mix. However, I’m a halfbreed. I’m pretty close. As well as trying to get my fullblood dad on the internet. (But he wants nothing to do with it.)

    I also know most of my people are either homeless or on reservations and the internet is a marvel only attained at the public library. I have 23 full blood cousins, my aunts, and my father- none of them own a computer and certainly wouldn’t partake in this.

    Despite being half, I identify with being an American indian, even though my skin is white. I’ve always been outcast from white girls. I talk “weird”, I act “weird.” And trust me, Indian men are -NOT- like other men.

    We have our own junk; no one really knows much about us. People are always in awe when I tell them I’m half. They want to know all sorts of things.

    So why did we get totally left out of the study?

    Why make it a choice and then totally ignore us?

  14. Bubu Bear says:

    OKC fucking ROCKS!

    (but)

    Critical to evaluation of the ethnic and cultural perspectives are which segments of population are being measured. Such relevant criteria as character, spiritual insightfulness and various intelligences would be valuable metrics to incorporate into your search engine to more readily establish delineation between incongruent and non-compatible segments and optimize matching of potential partners.

    The prevailing majority’s expression of the lowest common denominator of culture is the definition of commonness.
    Thank you for reassuring me of my statistically anonymous status.

  15. toomanyapples says:

    I don’t find any of my tagged interests among my racial and gender group. Fun statistics!

  16. Don Gwinn says:

    Am I the only one who thinks it’s a little weird that the author of the White-People section thinks there are no thunderstorms in cities?

  17. Rahul says:

    I think I can explain why “Idiots” is so high on Indians list.
    Its because of the recent bollywood blockbuster movie “3 Idiots”.
    Maybe you guys lost the “3” while parsing and were just left with Idiots.

  18. C says:

    I do find it interesting that plenty of pieces of non-stereotypical data — such as white women listing the Red Sox as their number one interest, and Asian (and BTW, I’m assuming you mean East Asian? Because Indians are Asian too, but you have them listed as a separate category) men really liking to play basketball–went unremarked upon, whereas the most stereotypical items on the list were all highlighted. Just a little food for thought, huh?

    Also, is it sad that I winced that the highest average reading level of people’s profiles was at around a 9th grade level? Because, wow. We really should be investing more in improving in the public school system if that’s the case.

  19. Barry says:

    Hi I’m black Canadian and i fit NONE of these stereotypes. I’m actually an atheist so I turn off a lot of people. The only think I can say that’s true with the survey is that blacks tend to be more religious than the other groups. That’s true due to slavery era in which the only thing they can survive on is religion (or something like that).

    This article is not scientific so this entire research is bogus, like their other “research findings” before. Humans are humans, no matter who or where you’re from. We are shaped and made by our surroundings and how we grow up, not our skin colour.

  20. Pete says:

    The interpretation of the race/religion reading data is seriously flawed. Confusing correlation with causation is a common mistake.

    Sincerely,

    A Catholic who writes above the 9th grade level.

  21. Bubu Bear says:

    @Kat
    Those who know the least know it the loudest. It’s a form of insecurity. Atheism is insistence on the unproven, an act of negative faith as much as any other religion is an act of positive faith. Agnosticism simply means “don’t know”, as opposed to Gnosis (knowing). To the extent we are conscious of God, we are gnostic. Conversely, the nature of the unseen God leaves us all somewhat agnostic.

    It would be nice to have a better definition matrix of personal belief available in the selections. Even being able to check several boxes and a 30 character “fill in the blank” option would allow a much more accurate depiction of who we are.

  22. Amused says:

    Atheisto, I hate to say it but you seem to be the outlier for the non-religious community. Go back and re-read the graphs, and pay attention to what the axis labels are before you go slamming him for the exact opposite of what his results show. BRILLIANT!

  23. J says:

    The Red Sox? Really? White women, we can do better.

  24. HAL 9000 says:

    I think we need to replace the AE-35 unit..
    Y’all is some crazzzzzy mf.a

  25. Joe says:

    Yay for us Atheists! Finally some good press!

  26. Melinda says:

    This was an interesting read, but the phrase “correlation does not imply causation” comes to mind.

  27. H. B. says:

    So a large cross-section of OKC users are, as shown above, the most mundane people on earth? Can’t say I’m surprised.

  28. RPhStutz says:

    Haha, and reading that just lowered the grade level further! It’s barely English!

  29. Name says:

    @ Kat

    Obviously people that do not post their beliefs are not in this survey. You are saying that intelligent Christians generally don’t post their beliefs and therefore are not in this survey? (just to clarify this before my argument)

    Well 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 a 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). It’s the same as when protestant religions started and were newer than Catholicism. And as such, a lot of atheists are what they are 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 what 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 8 of them think about it, 4 resting on Christianity and 4 resting on atheism, other 12 being ‘dumb’ followers of their parents blah blah blah… Now you have 14 smart atheists out of 26, and 14 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.

    Of course there is also the chance that the data is grossly sewed as it is a very rough way to gather information about this sort of thing. Who knows. Point is, assuming this data is relatively accurate: being Christian is not more likely to make you ‘dumb,’ but rather if you are dumb there is a higher chance that you are Christian because of the way that North American society has developed.

  30. Jaime says:

    There is no such thing as race. Period. These categories are asymentric.

    Whites = people from Christian Europe.

    Latinos = People who speak Spanish or Portuguese (or whose ancestors did)

    Asia = People from two thirds of the world, including East Asians, South Asians, etc

    Black = People from subsaharan Africa, or people with known African ancestors in the United States

    Native American = members of a recognized indigenous community from the Americas.

    None of these categories make much sense if they are used to compare people.

  31. Enrique says:

    Spaniards are white, Argentines are mostly white, Dominicans are mostly black, Peruvians are mainly Native American, but they are all “Latino” and therefore like merengue? This is ignorant!

  32. Harvey Fangboner says:

    Black Christians blow my mind. Africans were colonized/enslaved and forced by the white man to worship his god. Now they are the “most vocal” supporters of the white god! It’s like volunteer slavery!

    Even sadder, there is no good reason to believe in the Christian god in the first place. We can safely say, maybe there is a god, maybe there isn’t, but YHWH/Jesus is pure fantasy.

  33. Lly says:

    You probably know this, but the Coleman-Liau index has nothing to do with writing *proficiency*. It is a readability index. Thus it would be more accurate to say that the groups that write at the “highest levels” actually write at the “most difficult to comprehend” levels, but that everyone falls within approximately one grade of each other.

  34. Steve von Maas says:

    Very interesting.

    It’s also fascinating to me how bent-out-of-shape people get over statistical analysis. So many people react as if it has to reflect them or it isn’t valid, or as if they were being criticized personally, etc. It makes me think people have much stronger insistence on racial identification than they commonly reveal. Why else would someone react so viscerally when told that other members of their racial group either do, or don’t, tend to match their preferences?

    I also think the summary portrait of each group seems to reflect a sort of aggregation of posturing along race-conscious lines. Males of most groups seem to have common stereotypes into which they are trying hard to fit. Maybe this whole thing is more about how the movies and television shape our images of our physical selves and our ideas about our subcultures than it is about our authentic preferences, and these portraits “call us out” on this tendency.

  35. Haha says:

    @Pogo .. Umm there is a really popular Bollywood movie called “3 Idiots” or “Three Idiots” so that’s probably what Indian men were referring to when they mentioned “idiots”.

  36. luna says:

    I’m closer to a white male than anything else (though I’ve got girly parts hah!). Of course, even my own mother couldn’t classify me, and I highly doubt most people have heard of the bands and interests I list on my profile, let alone list them themselves. Cute though. I just can’t believe OKC has gotten away with a topic like this without the world screaming racism.

  37. Mark says:

    Is this a suicide note? It’s very brave and probably very stupid. Fascinating though.

  38. luna says:

    PS WTG atheists! Of course, we already knew all this for ourselves. ;p

  39. Jim says:

    Pogo, the reference to “idiots” on the Indian male list is probably because of the movie 3 Idiots, a popular Bollywood movie.

  40. brian says:

    i didn’t actually get to reading the whole article yet, but that picture of the white girl and the PB cracked my shit up haha.

  41. OneMustLiveLife says:

    THAT was a great laugh. Or to put it more clearly in my whiteness; bad ass fucking article, hilarious. Keep ‘em coming.

  42. Jayemel says:

    Come on white guys, The Big Lebowski? That’s what being a dude is about to you? Have you really been beaten down that far that you aspire to apathy?

  43. John says:

    I don’t have anything in common with any of the lists. I am a freethinking black guy. Looks like the story of my life though.
    So it goes.

  44. Maurog says:

    LittleKandiRav3r’s post does not indicate a trend, and doesn’t mean all Latino people are ignorant of statistics, it’s just one man’s opinion :P

    By the way, who else tried to click the Comic Sans “Christian” thinking it might contain trends for people who identify as Christians?

  45. Jason abdiweli says:

    Tom fuking clancy, dude Im super black and yet identified with 99% of stuff white males like, does this mean im confused? im I on the wrong team etc lol just joking but none the less I think im possessed by a white person or something cus black list was like foreign to me. gucci mane? is that an expensive bag?

  46. DrCHAR says:

    Actually rather interesting, though it should be noted that the cohort was based solely on people claiming to be single and actively seeking a relationship – rather skewing the population. Those who would malign this study have some valid points given the poor discussion of the data provided above. We all fall into a distribution and experience tells us that this distribution is normal (bell shaped curve).

    Everyone who ‘claims’ to be latino/white/black etc and can be scored on the quality of their writing (an assumed function of education rather than intelligence I might add) then some will be brilliant wordsmiths, and others very poor. Most people will be in the middle. Stats like this will compare the middle of the curve of Latino with the middle of white. If this reveals that people who claim to be ‘latino’ compose a poorer sentence than a white person does then this does not mean that all people who claim to be ‘latino’ are more stupid than all people who claim to be ‘white’, it means that ‘on average’ this is the trend. Error bars (something that real statisticians use to indicate variability in a population) are completely absent from this rather poor assessment.

    That this data cannot be normalised for education is a shame, but I have a feeling that there is sufficient research on education and social status for me to make an assumption that those who claim to be ‘Latino etc’ may have a worse opportunity with respect to education… But I am not an expert in this field, I just know data…

    The authors are not racist, they are just a bit stupid… If Christian (author) is a white athiest, then this will make my point nicely!

    This work would not stand up to the kind of peer review that all scientists must in order to publish such data, and I guess that is why it is on a website rather than in a journal… Silly silly silly…

  47. 210degrees says:

    I loved this. I found this article hilarious and true to life.

    While all of the words mentioned under “black female” may not necessarily be true for me I can recognize that many of my female family members and black girlfriends are accurately represented.

    I may be an agnostic who loves Ender’s Game and harbors a dislike for Justin Timberlake, but I was raised in a house where we went to church every Sunday, it was mandatory to both watch and read The Color Purple, and Justin Timberlake was often the only musician I had in common with girls of other races in high school.

    This article is totally interesting… oh and soul food is the best food on the planet. :P

  48. Kernel says:

    At least the stats tend to show that all the races represented here tend to suck equally but in different ways. Separate but equal, you might say.

  49. Lindsay says:

    This was so interesting! Thanks for doing this and sharing the results. I am esp. amused by the end — I always knew atheists were the smartest group :-)

  50. 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’