Nerds. As we all know, the Internet is a great place to pretend to be someone you're not. For instance, here's me in Second Life having a great time:

Anyhow, in many online situations, self-misrepresentation is totally harmless. Like, who cares if your Halo 3 avatar is taller than you are in real life? Or if flickr thinks you're single when you're really married? But in online dating, where the whole goal is to eventually meet other people in person, creating a false impression is a whole different deal.
People do everything they can in their OkCupid profiles to make themselves seem awesome, and surely many of our users genuinely are. But it's very hard for the casual browser to tell truth from fiction. With our behind-the-scenes perspective, we're able to shed some light on some typical claims and the likely realities behind them.

Let's get started.
"I'm 6 feet tall."
REALITY: People are two inches shorter in real life.
This whole post was inspired by an amusing graph we stumbled across while trying to answer the question Do taller guys have more sex? The answer, to a degree, is yes, and I'll expand on that in a little bit. But in this case what was more interesting than the sex was the (supposed) tallness of the guys.

The male heights on OkCupid very nearly follow the expected normal distribution—except the whole thing is shifted to the right of where it should be. You can see it better when we overlay the implied best fit below (pardon the technical language):

Almost universally guys like to add a couple inches. You can also see a more subtle vanity at work: starting at roughly 5' 8", the top of the dotted curve tilts even further rightward. This means that guys as they get closer to six feet round up a bit more than usual, stretching for that coveted psychological benchmark.
When we looked into the data for women, we were surprised to see height exaggeration was just as widespread, though without the lurch towards a benchmark height:

On a somewhat humbling personal note, I just went back and looked at my own profile, and apparently I list myself at 5' 11". Really, I'm a touch under 5' 10". Hmmm.
As for whether it even makes sense for people to make such an obvious and easily disproved exaggeration, the jury is out. We've found that taller people, up to a point, have more sex:

But as far as messages go, shorter women actually seem to get more attention:

These are the average weekly unsolicited message totals by height; you can think of these as the number of times a person is "hit on" out of the blue each week on OkCupid. a 5' 4" woman gets 60 more contacts each year than a six-footerThe genders are plotted on different scales because of the eternal fact that men almost always make the first move, so women get many more unsolicited messages.
It's plain from these two charts that women six feet or taller are either less attractive to men or are considered too intimidating to message. The data also raises the interesting possibility that these tall women are much more likely to sleep with a man who does approach them. Compare the 6' 0" woman to her 5' 4" counterpart: the taller woman gets hit on about two-thirds as much, yet has had slightly more sex partners.
"I make $100,000 a year."
REALITY: People are 20% poorer than they say they are.
Apparently, an online dater's imagination is the best performing mutual fund of the last 10 years. Here's what people are saying on OkCupid, versus what their incomes should be:
Use the slider to watch as people exaggerate more as they get older. As you can see, people advertise disproportionately high salaries for themselves. Just to pick a symbolic amount, there are consistently 4× the number of people making $100K a year than there should be.
Note that in formulating the "expected" lines for each age we were very careful to adjust for OkCupid's particular demographics: we compared every individual against the average not just by age but by zip code. Here a breakdown by gender of the exaggeration rates:

A woman may earn 76 cents on the dollar for the same work as a man, but she can fabricate, like, 85 cents no problem.
We did a little investigating as to whether a person's stated income had any real effect on his or her online dating experience. Unsurprisingly, we found that it matters a lot, particularly for men. This is a by-age messaging distribution:

These bold colors contain a subtle message: if you're a young guy and don't make much money, cool. If you're 23 or older and don't make much money, go die in a fire. It's not hard to see where the incentive to exaggerate comes from.
"Here's a recent pic."

REALITY: The more attractive the picture, the more likely it is to be out-of-date.
The above picture, for example, was over two years old when it was uploaded. How do we know? Most modern cameras append text tags to the jpgs they take. These tags, called EXIF metadata, specify things like the exposure and f-stop settings, gps information if your camera has it, and, of course, the time and date the photo was taken. This is how programs like iPhoto know when (and sometimes where) you've taken your pictures.
Analyzing this stuff, we found that most of the pictures on OkCupid were of recent vintage; site-wide the median photo age at upload was just 92 days. However, hotter photos were much more likely to be outdated than normal ones. Here's a comparison (the age of a picture below is how old it was when it was uploaded to our site):

As you can see, over a third of the hottest photos on the site are a year old or more. And more than twice as many hot photos are over three years old (12%) as average-looking ones (5%), which makes sense because people are more inclined to cling to the pics that make them look their best
Another useful (if somewhat unorthodox) way to take in this graph is to follow the horizontal gridlines. If you trace out from "20%", for example, you can see that 1 in 5 average-looking photos is at least a year old, meanwhile, among the hot photos, nearly 1 in 5 is at least two years old.
It also turns out that older people also upload older photos:

The upshot here is, if you see a good-looking picture of a man over 30, that photo is very likely to be out-of-date. Not to get personal again, but my own OkCupid photo shows a Burberry-dressed 27 year-old, strumming away on his guitar. Meanwhile, I turn 35 in a couple months and am writing this post in the same shorts and tee-shirt I've been wearing for a week. Time waits for no man, unless that man doesn't update his personal information.
"I'm bisexual."
REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender.
OkCupid is a gay- and bi-friendly place and it's not our intention here to call into question anyone's sexual identity. But when we looked into messaging trends by sexuality, we were very surprised at what we found. People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect. Site-wide, here's how it breaks out:

This suggests that bisexuality is often either a hedge for gay people or a label adopted by straights to appear more sexually adventurous to their (straight) matches. You can actually see these trends in action in the chart below.
Again, this is just the data we've collected. We'd be very interested in our bisexual users' thoughts on this single-sex-messaging phenomenon, so if you'd like to weigh-in please use the comments section. Please note, everybody, that we don’t assume that bis should be “into both genders equally.” We only assume that they should be into both genders at all. The swaths of red and blue that you see in these sexuality charts represent people who message only one gender. The purple areas are people who send any messages, in whatever proportion, to both men and women.

In this chart, throughout the teens and twenties, the male bisexual population is mostly observably gay men. By the mid-thirties, it seems, most of these men are more comfortable self-identifying as gay and have left the bi population. By the end of our chart, 3 of every 4 bi males on OkCupid are observably straight. Meanwhile, the proportion of men who message both women and other men holds fairly steady.
The proportions for women are more consistent over time:

12% of women under 35 on OkCupid (and the internet in general, I'd wager) self-identify as bi. However, as you can see above, only about 1 in 4 of those women is actually into both guys and girls at the same time. I know this will come as a big letdown to the straight male browsing population: three-fourths of your fantasies are, in fact, fantasies of a fantasy. Like bi men, most bi women are, for whatever reason, not observably bi. The primacy of America's most popular threesome, two dudes and an Xbox, is safe.
In gathering data for this last section on sexuality, we found so much interesting stuff that we're making it the topic of our next post. We'll look at the messaging, searching, and stalking (!) patterns of gay, bi, and straight people and see what else we can learn about the sexual continuum. Until then, no lie: thanks for reading.
This now puts me in a moral quandary. I really am 6’1″, Do I now change that to 6’3″ because everyone will be assuming that I was adding a couple of inches anyway?
Most of the bisexuals that I know find themselves looking for only one gender in online dating environments. This is generally because they either have a partner of gender x or are more able to meet partners of gender x in person. The techniques foe picking up men and women are very different. I find, for example, that I can really easily pick up men in person and do. Women are more complex for me to meet and engage.
What about the lies people tell about their age. I’ve been out with/looked at profiles of men who are definitely lying about their age by about 3-7 years. That used to be a stereotype of women, so what’s up with the guys?
On the “bi seeks only one gender” I’ve seen that a lot, the explanation being that the person already has a steady partner of one gender and wants to bring in an extra of the other.
Regarding the lies about their height, it would be interesting to look at US-Americans and the British and the rest of the world separately – in other words, to look at people using imperial and metric systems separately. I have just a vague idea how tall 6 feet is (and I’m too lazy to look it up), but I guess something similar happens to people using the metric system: the closer they get to 1.80 m or 1.90 m, the more they tend to exaggerate their height in order to pass those magic numbers.
I really wonder whether taking this into account would further pronounce the deviation from normality. (and yes, I am really a 1.80 m tall science geek)
Regarding the hotter photos being older:
I can think of a good reason for this. People will typically upload the best (or ‘hottest’) photo of themselves. The size of the photo pool is presumably linear to the duration of the period which the pool spans. Therefore, the expected hotness of an uploaded photo increases as the pool’s duration increases.
Noting that the expected duration of the pool grows at a rate of O(e^x^2) with hotness (according to my very quick calculations), we can see that increases in hotness can rapidly be expected to correspond to a massive increase in pool duration.
The bit about bisexuality as a nice little tag on the dating profile is something I’ve observed elsewhere as well. I’m not knocking bisexuality, but it’s definitely so that at least a lot of females just feel like tagging themselves as such merely for hotness credit.
it would be interesting not to see only the bi people messaging statistics but also in comparition with gays and with heterosexuals
Some people have hinted at this already, but what’s missing from this analysis is any evidence that OKC users do not actually differ from other Americans.
Admittedly, it’s hard to imagine why we’d be taller (and we’ve all met people who’ve lied about this ).
14% of American adults don’t know how to read and 40% of Americans have no access to high-speed internet (http://bit.ly/bVyDCA). But nearly everyone on OKC has access to high-speed Internet and can read and write. Accordingly, it seems safe to assume that our average income is significantly higher than that of the average American.
Just a comment, but the “The Patented OkCupid Income Revelator Machine” seems really really biased for the Silicon Valley area. The ratio of income for Men/Women is really off. 50K/100K does not seem right (Female/Male). I’m not sure where the information is coming from but if that’s actually true, then perhaps the whole experiment is off based on the likely users of OKCupid by job description.
The height analysis ignores the fact that OKcupid users are *not* a random sample of the US population in general. The older generations bring the average down. If you plot OKcupid male heights against those of an *age-matched* cohort of US males, you will probably find the supposed height exaggeration is smaller or nonexistent.
i don’t think that you can assume that people are misrepresenting their height
simply because the curve distribution does not match the normal one.
perhaps, if taller men are having more sex, then they are less likely to use a
dating website to meet someone. that might be enough to skew the curve
This is why I don’t list what I make. If she’s looking for money, she can walk away.
I want to see a post on gender diversity by region. I did a match search with the broadest possible search criteria and found that active OK Cupid users within 100 miles of me are 70% male and 30% female. This is not a promising report if I were to remain an active user. I want to go where the women either equal or outnumber men.
All what upset me really is that men make a hell more A LOT then women , not like 20 % , 40 % more but + 55 % ,which is really annoying to me and hopeless : (
I’m curious, if any OKC Summer Interns can get back to me on this, or put in another post, what’s the per unit time for sex partners on the height graph and how to arrive at the figure? Thanks.
This was really neat, ironically- my partner who I met here WAS 2 inches shorter, maybe not the full two inches AND could definitely pass as 5 10 in shoes.
As a bisexual female- in a relationship & looking for a triad, yes I tend to respond/look for female profiles more. I think I might actually respond to males more often though?
I’m not sure, I think that most bisexuals at least the monogamous ones are interested in one sex at a time but are open to relationships with either.
In general, I have a stronger sexual preference for men; comfort zone. But my interest in women is more than fleeting or experimental. It feels rounded out. You know?
whatever happened to stalking?! i totally liked that better than “viewing”
anyway i positively adore this blog. i know i’ve said that before but it’s so stimulating. i’m all wet now.
The problem with the height calculation is that medical professionals will make you take your shoes off, but people who measure their height themselves don’t necessarily do that.
Well, I am a 6’1 man who makes about 45k a year. I am honest about this in my profile. Sounds like I need to start lying to stay competitive then. Um, thanks for that… I guess.
The stuff about bi people is consistent with other studies I’ve read. Like this Times piece.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/05/health/05sex.html?_r=1
It’s interesting to me that there’s no mention here of the biggest lie I’ve encountered over and over again in internet dating – weight. I’ve had to learn the hard way that everything other than “slim” or “slender” (and in some cases even those) means “overweight”. “Average” and “athletic” have become pet words for women who are 30 pounds overweight. “Curvy”, “voluptuous”, and “Rubenesque” add a romantic flair to being 50 pounds overweight. And then, of course, we are never really “overweight” at all(even with an extra 100 pounds)… we’re just “full figured”.
The problem occurs when this is all hidden or smoothed over by blurry, old, or headshot photos; and then, after spending four weeks getting to know someone via email and phone, I’m supposed to “not care” about this minor detail when I meet you (AND still pay for the date).
Yes, I can see your eyes rolling, but consider this: The difference between a friendship and a relationship is intimacy; and it’s pretty hard to be intimate with someone you’re not physically attracted to. Physical attraction (which is not beauty) is number two of the 5 major components of a relationship, but it is the first, most outwardly apparent of the five, and without it, you are doomed to an awkward, unsatisfying, or short-lived coexistance. Does that sound “shallow” to you…?
Is this what we’ve come to? We now start lying to our partners before we’ve even met them?
One thing I would say about the findings for bisexual individuals is that perhaps who they choose to message is influenced by their dating pool off the website. If you’re equally interested in men and women, but only men hit on you at bars maybe you come to website looking for women. Just something to keep in mind.
I’m listed as bi, but I really only message other guys. That’s because I’m generally quite a bit more attracted to men than women (like, 90% men, 10% women). I still list myself as bi, though, because one of the few women whom I happen to be attracted to might just be on OkCupid, and I want to keep my options open.
I’m glad you’ll be investigating these trends further because you absolutely cannot infer from this data that bisexuality is “a hedge for gay people or a label adopted by straights to appear more sexually adventurous”. this conclusion doesn’t take into consideration the reason a person has joined okcupid — not everyone on here is messaging people for dating. also, as many have already mentioned, ‘bisexual’ is a lifetime descriptive label but it is a poor one — it does not mean that bisexual people are interested in both sexes all the time. without Kinsey information (or other continuum scales) on individual users, accurate conclusions cannot be drawn.
When you make your OKcupid profile, it adds an inch to the height you select. This happened to me as well as two of my friends. Could be the cause of the height issue.
The analysis of the height distributions is oversimplified– the male height distribution looks like it’s more like two overlapping peaks that aren’t quite resolved. Both slightly to the right of the US distribution– some guys add a little, some add a lot? The women’s looks like it may be also be multiple peaks, or maybe just a broader distribution of the exaggeration. It would be interesting to try some slightly more complicated (e.g. multiple gaussian) fits to both.
I’m sure the data is all correct but I am not so sure about the speculations as to the causes.
Nice data and a very interesting read!
I’m doubtful it would make much difference, but are you comparing American okc users to American averages, or are you comparing ALL okc users to American averages? Obviously the former would be the fairest comparison.
It’s probably also important to consider that all the homeless, destitute people in America do not use online dating sites. In other words, okc users are probably likely to be richer than a country’s average income because poor people can’t access okc (whereas rich people can). I’m not sure if this would have any measurable impact in reality, but it’s an interesting thought.
Kim Komando(of radio fame) mentioned this on her radio show today. I didn’t know where she got the info from, but now I see it was from you. I do think there is truth to most of it. Of the 4 people I have met in person, all of them had embellished the facts a little. But then again, maybe they thought the same about me.
My favorite quote in the article:
“The primacy of America’s most popular threesome, two dudes and an Xbox, is safe.”
My least favorite part: Men in my town make 66% more than women. Or, women make only 58% of what men make. I thought we were at 76 on the dollar. Here it seems we’re at 61 cents on the $1.08. Sucky!
well, i guess i should add a few inches and about 30 grand to my profile.
” bernard
RE: the bi-analysis. did you only include people who identified as single? possible that bi-girl and straight-boyfriend are on OK?”
Thank you for thinking, Bernard, and not having an emotional, reflex. And he poses a valid point.
For those who take things like this and get defensive and/or upset — how crazy to tirade “OKC is biphobic and doesn’t understand bisexual theory” blah blah blah. Relax. They were quite forward with the parameters they used. If most people were able to approach numbers — or even words for that matter — with the understanding that definition is everything, there’d be a lot less conflict in the world. (I’m of the opinion that 99% of all conflict is based on miscommunication, actually.) Calling someone discriminatory because of the question they asked, what they measured, and the result it produced is possible, but unlikely in this context. And I think the offended parties know that. Sorry you feel marginalized, but clearly that’s because there are so few of you running around in the world (that self-identify, that is — I mean, most people are bisexual to some degree) Anyway, if you have problems with data or the entire idea of inductive reasoning, stop reading these sorts of things — you’re going to have a stroke.
On the height issue, one person raised a great point, however. Data like this, when it’s easy to say “a majority of people do X” does make people more likely to think that people telling the truth are lying — but that’s going to happen regardless. I wrestle often with listing my age accurately in my profile (I do, btw, but I consider changing it all the time). It took me forever to realize that most gay men who are in their late 20’s are actually in their 30’s — and that a lot of gay men in their 30’s are in their 40’s or 50’s, sometimes, if they play the 38 or 39 card. I’m 36, could EASILY pass for 30, and fear that people see 36 and think I’m actually 42. I won’t lie about it because if I actually want to meet someone, I don’t want them to think “liar” right after they meet me — but I’ve thought for a while now that there should be options for independent verification in profiles. Or stations that take “official” photos of people so they can be verified. Online dating is likely here to stay — may as well try to make it more efficacious.
Of course, I think all the time — I don’t know if I’ve ever really fallen in love with someone whose profile I would have responded to online. I’ve MET plenty of people online and had a 5 year relationship with one — but that was in the dark ages before we all had pictures to send of ourselves. I wish these sites were more helpful — and I keep trying — but we all need to do a better job of trying to be less superficial if we’re hoping for more than just sex.
As you have already observed, being a female I am less likely to initiate a correspondance with another member. Therefore of course most messages are with guys, they are the majority that message me. Any girls interested? Look at my profile, or message me.
So basically…
Most people on OKCupid are liars and the women are only interested in money.
Great. That really incentivized my involvement.
As a bisexual woman, I signed up for OkCupid to meet women. I messaged way more women than men, simply because in real life, it is very easy for me to meet men, and not easy for me to meet women. I did not list myself as a lesbian because I didn’t want the women I met to think I was portraying myself falsely when they found out that I also like men. I like both equally!!
I’m a bisexual woman who is mostly interested in women, but overwhelmingly messages men. The reason is that a lot of the women on the site are either intimidating or unattractive. For example, I’ve almost given up finding a lesbian woman because they hardly ever respond to bisexual women. There seems to be a distrust there. Likewise, I’m interested in tomboyish girls, but I myself am a tomboy, and very often I’ll go to a tomboyish girl’s page and she’s extremely attractive but at the top it says “I’m interested in femme girls.”
As a result, the female dating pool is limited severely. Men on the other hand, there are tons of them on this site and I get messages from them every few days or whatever.
I’d also like to note that bisexuality isn’t always (or really, usually isn’t) a 50/50 split.
I am bisexual. I am enormously attracted to women, but feel much more comfortable with men. I have messaged *some* women on OKCupid, but it’s rare. It’s kinda funny, because you’d think I’d be more comfortable on here, where everyone lists their sexual orientation, than in public where I have to take the risk of offending someone. But in a gay bar, at least, I can get that visual feedback and know if the girl is attracted to me in some way.
I also agree that bisexuals go through periods in our lives where we are more attracted to one than the other. But for me, it’s mostly a matter of comfort.
As for photo age, I tend to put approximate dates on my photos so people can know.
Oh, I just stumbled across this post yesterday via a newspaper article, and it’s… whew, awesome, fun… yeah. Makes me want to sign up for OKcupid immediately, although I have no dating needs whatsoever… However, I’d be interested in results about how to create profiles (pictures, text,…) that don’t just act as the best possible advertisement (generating as many conversation starting messages from interesting people as possible) but that act as good filters too, warding off as many unwanted/unwelcome messages/messages from people I’m not interested in (that I don’t reply to) as possible. Well, not as many as possible maybe, but the attracting and the warding off should be in some sensible ratio. Like, there’s two sides to a good algorithm, completeness *and* soundness, and I think its the same for women profiles, only fuzzier.
So how do I create a profile that not just gets a lot of responses that I in turn am interested in responding to, but that gets few responses I need to sift through and ignore and thus keeps my annoyance low? There are always factors that aren’t covered by my match score, because the match score only takes into account factors that I am aware of. But there must be other, subtler, more unconscious factors at work as well. Maybe some number crunching can reveal some?
I notice a lot of stuff within the text of a profile that I doubt is 100% truthful as well. If most of the people on OKC are into all of the fun and exciting hobbies they list on their profiles, I don’t have the time, money, or energy to keep up with them.
I don’t get it. Why would people lie about themselves … when it will come out pretty much in one of the first meetings. Sorry, but, if I talk to somebody whom I meet here, they have a wrong age posted, they have a photoshopped picture where they look like some fashion model yet they turn out to be short and dumpy and looking 15 years older in RL (this actually happened to me)- never mind how much I enjoy their wit, company and intellect, I’m going to have trust issues right there and then, and it won’t take much to make me walk away.
The funny thing is that I don’t have anything against people over 50, or 60, short, or dumpy, but I have a real problem with dishonesty and prevarication. Neither are good starting points for friendship or relationships.
With regards to bisexuality:
Many of us are really tired of the use of gender-binary models on OkCupid. When will there be other options? FetLife just added a couple more genders the other day and now they have ELEVEN to choose from! If this is such a progressive site, why does it provide only two choices?
I know you addressed this, but OkCupid only gives (essentially) 3 sexual orientation options: gay, bisexual, and straight. I’ve read many profiles of people who have chosen “bisexual” from that list, and the first thing in their self summary corrects that choice into identifying as androgynous (in terms of gender) and queer or pansexual (in terms of sexual orientation). Just a little tid bit.
It would have been particularly interesting if “I would rather not say” was included in the heat map for by-age distributed messaging for income. Most, nearly all, of the tech people I know don’t list their [above-average] incomes because they don’t want to be judged by them; even if it would be a net-win in quantity, it is not believed to be a win in quality.
People lie because they are desperately lonely to the point where it overtakes their common sense.
You probably have that trend with bisexuality because there is no option for “queer” and a lot of the more radical folks will refuse to identify as either gay or straight because they do not want to perpetuate a gender binary. To call that trend a “hedge” for gay people or a way to seem more sexually adventurous is problematic and offensive to queer people. Please do not equate promiscuity or shame with queerness.
i wanna see a graph and a reason why men message women more then women message men.
I identify myself as bisexual woman when given the three OKC options, and I have messaged both men and women on OKC, but the truth of the matter is that I’m attracted to a certain type of gender portrayal, one that usually coincides more with dudes. Also, I’m in an environment where meeting women isn’t really a problem, but meeting men is kind of difficult- hence the online dating. I put “bisexual” in my profile because it’s the most honest option, even though most of the messages I send/respond to are with men. But I guess everybody has their own situation.
Well it looks like I am now 6′ 4″, make over 100k, and … yep, still straight though! lol
THANK YOU for outing the height exaggeration! As a 5’9″ woman, I’ve discovered in my own personal practice that if I want to date someone taller than me, I have to assume anyone saying their 5″11 or 5’10 is shorter than me. Nothing bothers me more! (well, maybe a few other lies…!). But seriously — how do these guys think a material lie like this that can actually be proven bodes well for them? Just tell the truth – embrace who you are!