This week we will confront an unfortunate truth of online dating: no matter how much time you spend polishing your profile, honing your IM banter, and perfecting your message introductions, it’s your picture that matters most.
We’re going to look at how your photos affect both the messages you get and how successful your own outgoing messages are. We all know that beautiful people are more successful daters, but let’s quantify by exactly how much.
To illustrate the exact spectrum of looks we’re talking about here, and to put some human faces on our discussion, I want to introduce a few photos of real OkCupid users. Here are two women near the top of our range.
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And here are two rated in the middle.
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As for photos at the bottom of the curve, it didn’t feel right to write someone and say “can I use you to illustrate the concept of ugliness on my blog?” so you’ll just have to extrapolate.
The above featured users have graciously agreed to let me post their pictures, so please don’t make them regret it. Funnily enough, I had to write about a dozen beautiful female users before anyone would even get back to me. Life imitates blog!
Anyhow, I know attractiveness is far from a universal concept, but maybe keep these folks in mind as we go through the data.
We’ll start with a simple line chart. The information I’ll present in this post is not normalized because, as we’ll see, it’s interesting how men and women evaluate looks differently.
Our chart shows how men have rated women, on a scale from 0 to 5. The curve is symmetric and surprisingly charitable: a woman is as likely to be considered extremely ugly as extremely beautiful, and the majority of women have been rated about “medium.” The chart looks normalized, even though it’s just the unfiltered opinions of our male users.
Given the popular wisdom that Hollywood, the Internet, and Photoshop have created unrealistic expectations of how a woman should look, I found the fairness and, well, realism, of this gray arc kind of heartening.
Now let’s superimpose the distribution of actual messages guys have sent:
When it comes down to actually choosing targets, men choose the modelesque. Someone like roomtodance
2/3 of male messages go to the top 1/3 of women.
above gets nearly 5 times as many messages as a typical woman and 28 times as many messages as a woman at the low end of our curve. Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages go to the best-looking third of women. So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten.
The medical term for this is male pattern madness.
The female equivalent of the above chart shows a different bias:
As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable. But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.
Just to illustrate that women are operating on a very different scale, here are just a few of the many, many guys we here in the office think are totally decent-looking, but that women have rated, in their occult way, as significantly less attractive than so-called “medium”:
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Females of OkCupid, we site founders say to you: ouch! Paradoxically, it seems it’s women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the “average” member of the opposite sex.
Finally, I just want to combine the two charts to emphasize how much fuller the inboxes of good-looking people get. I have scaled this graph to show multiples of messages sent to the lowest-rated people. For instance, the most attractive guys get 11× the messages the lowest-rated do. The medium-rated get about 4×.
This graph also dramatically illustrates just how much more important a woman’s looks are than a guy’s.
Now let’s take a look at how senders’ and recipients’ attractivenesses affect reply rates, not just the number of messages sent.
As you’d expect, more attractive people get more replies. And since they themselves get so many more messages than everyone else, they write back much less frequently. Here’s the graph for female senders, plotted in evenly-spaced “attractiveness groups.”
And here’s the one for male senders.
One interesting thing seems to be going on here: when the best-looking men write the worst-looking women, taste the rainbow,
of self-esteem issues their message success rate takes a big hit. The knee-jerk response would be to somehow chalk it up to hunky spammers, but we very carefully control for that in these articles, and in any event why would better-looking girls be drastically more susceptible to it? It seems to be some kind of self-confidence thing.
As we did before, I’m going to consolidate the line charts to show just how your attractiveness changes how often your messages get responses.
This post has been the preamble to the larger discussion of “what makes a good profile?” We’ve spent a lot of time on OkTrends looking at messages, and since your profile is the other important place you express yourself, we thought it deserved the same treatment.
I wanted to address physical attractiveness right at the start, because obviously it’s a huge factor in how successful your profile is. In the upcoming posts in this series, we’re going to control for attractiveness, so that we can deliver real and useful advice for all the non-models out there.
We’ll look at, among other things: what makes a good picture (is it taken outside? inside? is it full-body? a head-shot? with your pet snake? what?), what kinds of self-presentation will get you the most messages (jokey? flirty? all business?), and how much profile information is too much. Should be good.
So am I to understand that there are only that there are no attractive people of color on this site?
Hmm… This is a hit to the self-esteem. Apparently, since I get less than a 25% response rate to my messages, I’m in the lowest of the low attractiveness category. OUCH! Lol
My system is more
1 star: dear god.
2 stars: meh.
3 stars: maybe.
4 stars: would do.
5 stars: really, really wanna do.
More, please! <3
Fun article! I will be excited when the next one comes out about what makes a good profile.
I will have to say… I am another one that only rates 3,4, or 5 stars. I don’t see the point in rating 1 or 2 since it does nothing for matches. I imagine this skews results a bit. I am sure I am not the only one who does this.
Interesting article nonetheless. Almost makes me want to take a stats class.
So… the only place there is a natural distribution is in the way men see women (and the # of stars?)
Other than the log curve on female receiving/attractiveness, there are no statistically natural results, really.
But who am I kidding, I wanna see my numbers!!!
Hmm wondering why my comment was not registered.
I believe there is a reverse relationship between “perceived self worth” and “actual self worth”.
Holy ****, If a guy’s attractiveness hits a peak at one, I must be hitting negative numbers when they rate me. LoL, Awesome funness on the statistics OKC. Keep up the good work.
As a couple of others have asked, I’d be interested to know what’s my average rating too. Sure, the result might be soul-crushing disappointment, but at least then we can take steps to address the issue!
Also, I might have helped screw the ratings on appearance. When I rate somebody, I do so based on their OVERALL appeal factor to me and how interested I am in them. That is, I take into account not only their appearance, but also their writing skill, what they’ve written on their profile, whether they smoke/drink etc. There are some absolutely beautiful women on OKC that I’ve rated only 1 or 2 stars because I’ve looked at our personalities and hobbies and deemed that they wouldn’t be suitable for me.
Like John I, I only use 4 and five stars because, as I understand it, they’re the only ones important to the system. 4 stars to anyone whose rating of me would pique my curiosity, and 5 stars to mark women I’m really interested in, so that they’re easily searchable from the ocean of 4s I’ve rated. I don’t know of any incentive to use stars 1-3.
So how can I know my average rating? Even on A-List , I can’t find it under “Statistics”. I can find how I rated others, but not me.
Very interesting data collection as usual though I’m sure the real story is more complex.
If this data is collected purely from the star rating system then we should note that there are other factor effecting the decision making process. Actually when I’m rating I am not only looking at the pictures and the whole profile will get read. So the premise that the rating system is an accurate measure of looks along is false.
Actually when you rate someone high you are simply signaling that you think they are right for you AND you want to let them know in the hope they’ll also find a match with you. So you might like someone for example or even find them attractive but you would rate them 4+ unless you were actually prepared for them to contact you.
When you rate 4+ you know that the person you rate 4+ will receive an email and nobody wants to feel they are rejected and not have the person reciprocate. Plus there is the chance that the person will know who you are (I mean come on, nobody can tell me they can’t work out which person has rated them 4 plus… because only one of the faces in the email is the same as the ones you get asked to rate!).
I gotta say the male rating female graph looks much more like a regular population bell curve so I would say this would be the most ‘clean’ and honest record of opinion.
I too find it fascinating that women rate so harshly. I generally have found that people are bad judges of their own attractiveness, but the idea that women in general thing men are basically ugly is somewhat tragic.
I think it would be awesome to somehow find out our own star rating, even if it hurts.
Hands down, one of the best representations of fact into the female judgement system. Would it be too much to copy this article into my messages I send?
Fascinating though not surprising. Keep the statistics coming. I am looking forward on the quantitative analysis of what makes a successful profile. Probably ought to control for geography, though, as people living in cities have a larger pool of people they’d potentially get along with than those living in smaller towns.
While the data seems to suggest that women have a bizarre idea of what an average-looking man is, I would bet you a million dollars that if you had women rate each other it would come out roughly the same – 90% of other women being ‘below average’, with average and above being the elite. I’m just thinking of all the times I’ve been out with women friends of mine, I’ve decided to go off and flirt with someone, only to come back to my friend to hear why the person I was just talking to was terribly, terribly wrong.
My point is that I don’t think it has anything to do with unrealistic expectations about men per se. What is it then? I have no idea.
I often don’t even bother writing the “super-attractive” chicks… I figure there is too much competition and not much point.
But really for me to write a lady I need some kind of thing to feed off of in their profile- maybe something goofy or cleaver.
this is all very interesting, but what about the gays? I bet we can outdo both straight men and women in superficiality and unrealistic expectations.
I’d like to thank you once again for an informative page to spend my time with. It’s funny to think of all the things that make or break our experience on OKC.
I have some interesting input that could be considered when comparing this online info, to that in a bar or any other real life scenario.
Online, Attractiveness is taken only in the aspect of physical qualities. The physical qualities that are often conveyed in an “above average” posters profile picture is all that this comes down to.
For women to receive a decent “average” or “above average” score she most normally just has to have a cute face/smile. In reality that is really all that matters because 90% of guys are not attracted to girls that have good bodies but less than average faces. However, girls with average body types and a cute smile will make nearly every guy feel attracted especially online and women post the cutest pictures they have of themselves.
ONLINE a woman is not satisfied with a guy with an average face and average body. They (women) are here to find their prince charming or a guy that meets all of their criteria. Their criteria is more strict than a guys criteria of a woman.
In the REAL World, a woman IS ok with a guy with just an average body type as long as that guy has the ability to make her feel attracted by using his attitude.
Honestly, I have a message return rate of about 5% to women I’ve sent messages to on OKC (10/200 or so, I must be ugly, but that’s ok). Only about 1% have actually been messages with any real interest in me. Of course in real life, the attitude I convey leads me to have much better odds when meeting/befriending/dating women. Even in real life, when dealing with women of great beauty, I have not had problems in the past going on dates or keeping them attracted to me because of my attitude. (Kind of hard to convey attitude online)
That’s it for now…Feel free to contradict me if you like. These are only my experiences/opinions and not everyones.
One thing that struck me about the comparative photos is their respective ages. The prettiest ones look to be early 20’s, whereas the middle ones looked to be closer to 30. They look just fine to me, but I wouldn’t rate them highly, since they are older than I. It’s easy to assume that most of us are looking for people close to our own age. I don’t know the age distribution of OKCupid users, but I would not be surprised to find out that it was slanted towards younger users. Could these findings be reflecting an age bias, as well as an appearance bias?
Oh, and, am I crazy, or does the 4th guy look oddly like a white Barack Obama?
This is awesome. I love you guys.
Oh, I have been doing it wrong I guess.
I only have 3 ratings I give: 4, 5, and “can’t tell”.
This is why I pay for A-List. Stereotype breaking analysis, insight, and wisdom from my favorite number lovers (is there a fetish for that?)
So… What about us Gays? I’m guessing the curve will resemble the Female rating of Males, with a very high (and illogical) standard applied for attractiveness.
–richard
In the ”message multipler” plot, I think you want to control for the skewed ratings. In other words, you’ve indicated that ratings are handed out differently by the different sexes and then subsequently used the actual ratings for said plot. Instead, I think you should publish an update (if I may be so bold to request such a thing) that plots the “message multipler” vs. percentile of rating.
So, you’re telling us that men and women are shallow? GASP! Thanks for letting us know, we had no idea.
It appears that being the supremely good looking guy that I am puts all the other guys in the shade as even worse-looking than medium.
Sorry guys, I just can’t help it
What measure are you using in this test to rate a photo’s attractiveness? There is no mention of it in the article. There is no obvious mechanic for this in OKcupid itself. I see the Quickmatch feature, but if that was just for rating the pictures I assume you wouldn’t present profile information. (That and you can’t rate someone 0 stars) I rate really attractive people 1 sometimes because their profile doesn’t look compatible with me.
I guess you are using some sort of “top secret” method to determine attractiveness that you don’t want to reveal to the public.
A statisitical study without detailed methodology is somewhat questionable, though.
As somebody mentioned is there a way of seeing this individual attractiveness rating on our profile or was this generated for a specific group of people for the purposes of this survey.
Interesting results anyway. Women judge more men to be ugly than a normal distribution would allow, but men are more shallow in who they contact.
When you come to the question of how much information is too much, feel free to use my profile as an example of the high end of the spectrum. It’s kinda out of control.
I like how people feel the need to cut down the pretty girls… Anywho, I don’t think that it is fair to say that either women or men are shallow or cruel based on the graphs; they are just different. And maybe that’s what makes it all work out in the end. I’m really not surprised. The data extrapolates everything that I already believe about human biology, attraction, and sexual reproduction. Men send 2/3 of their mail to the most physically attractive females because they represent health and fertility. You would think that better looking, younger women would have the healthiest babies. As for the women they are very, very, very selective. Choosing only the most perfect suitor and best provider for a family regulates the birth rate… The data suggests that women rate 80% of men below average, but I look at it another way. What about the other 20%? If we said that the okcupid women are willing to *possibly* date and marry and HAVE CHILDREN with 20 out of 100 okcupid men, that is still rather high. Nine months of pain, forget it. I would set my own standards at 1 out of 100, or even less.
“…than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable…”
Because looks are the only important aspect in a relationship and because you are not Fabio, you statistically will not be with a women you think is beautiful HAHA.
I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO SEE A STUDY ON THE CORRELATION BETWEEN AND RESPONSE. i IMAGINE SHORTER MEN AND TALLER WOMEN HAVE LESS RESPONSE. WHY DOES HEIGHT EVEN MATTER WHEN WE ARE ALL THE SAME LYING DOWN? i AM APPALLED WHEN CHICKS A FEW INCHES SHORTER THAN (USUALLY 6) SAY i AM TOO SHORT. i AM 6 FOOT!
This is pretty interesting. Quantitative Methods used to determine these findings.. no doubt perhaps SPSS was used. Still.. women have unrealistic standards for men more than men have for women? Hm. I thought men were very picky.
One thing you should consider factoring in that should make the females-who-message-guys stats somewhat suspect… is the fact that much of the time, women DON’T message guys period. They wait for guys to message them… which we do… I’m not complaining about it, makes perfect sense, if they get tons of messages sitting in their inbox they are less likely to take the effort to write a ‘fresh’ message.
Thus, a female messaging a guy, regardless of whether its an attractive woman or not-attractive woman and regardless of the guys attractiveness………………. isn’t reallly the norm.
IMO those stats don’t give a great picture of the mentality of OKC women vs OKC men, it also explains why those stats seem a bit more confusing.
i think women are more likely to message guys they have starred as less attractive because we have a better understanding of how supply and demand works than does the average guy. i also think we place less of a premium on looks. do a blog on how male actors and artists stack up against designers or how male teachers stack up against finances guys and you’ll see more agreement between how women rate their appeal and how often they message or reply. I know it is cynical, and i personally don’t fit the mold, but it is a mold, none-the-less.
also? i give a lot of guys ones who, if i were drunk, maybe just might be 3s. so, there’s that.
i thought the ratings would influence who i match with so i was being all aspirational. sorry guys!
This blog is genius. Well done!
Especially funny how the “less-than-average” photos are actually of the guys who work at OkCupid! Good self-deprecating sense of humor. (Or I guess you didn’t want to have to email some normal dudes asking to use their pictures in that fashion…)
Anyway, well done. What you apparently lack in woman-oriented good looks you make up for in smarts. Which isn’t worth jack shit in the dating world, but it makes the rest of us happy.
I’m curious as to the effect that “friend messages” have on this data. Like, there’s a couple females on this site that message back and forth with me frequently, mostly to mock other OKC members behind their back. Do you have a way of filtering these emails? Or is it just being taken on the whole? Similarly, do you have a way of monitoring content? Because I think that WHY these people are emailing each other is a factor worth considering. For instance, I get a good share of fat chicks emailing me just to berate me for something I said in my, their, or someone else’s journal. Obviously, that shouldn’t be considered in coming up with statistical e-dating data.
Stats+human behavior+attractiveness=full of win. This blog is great and is a wonderful advertisement for OKC to boot.
As a female on OkCupid, I rate looks honestly from my own perspective, as a potential match *for me*. Now I’m maybe around the two or three mark on an objective scale, so a conventionally handsome male is highly unlikely to find me attractive, so they don’t grab my attention. They may be Adonis like, but by being so, they invalidate themselves as potentially interesting *to me*, so get a lower star rating.
Sorry to skew your data an incy wincy bit, OkCupidites, but until you expressly state what you are doing with my clicks, I will click as I find convenient. Is the “Rate his looks” facility flagged adequately so that users are aware that they are supposed to be rating per a somewhat conventional scale?
Another point: I’m far, far less interested in a man’s appearance than in his intellect, ethics and other characteristics. This may extrapolate to other women who may be rating men as conventionally unattractive or (as I do) not a good match for looks, yet it not matter a great deal to them in making their decision about whether to reply or contact him.
man, I don’t get like any messages at all. I get some replies to messages and IM’s I send. but never an outright message from someone I didn’t message initially. *sadface*
I wonder if the quality of the photos themselves makes any difference regardless of how good the person looks. I know I’m not exactly the greatest looking dude in the universe, but I look like ass in 99% of photos. Only if I really clean myself up and get a professional photo do I look like I do in person.
Great stuff! I love these articles. You guys are the fivethirtyeight.com of online dating.
Great article and awesome job on the charts. I can believe hotter women receiving more messages as well as hot men and their response rates. There are tons of studies based on the hotness of a person (I mean, that’s why we have hot or not, right?) There was a case study that proved that when people needed to ask another person a question, they tended to ask the hotter person because they look nicer. In addition, when people have to choose to sit at a table next to a hot person or an average looking person, pretty much every single time, they will sit at the table next to the hot person.
It’s in our genes. We want the best and the hottest to survive. Nobody ever marries someone thinking ‘Man, I’m going to have ugly kids. Awesome.’
Hey where are the promised gay trends analyses? It wouldn’t take that much of an extra effort to churn out those numbers and graphs don’t you think?!
idster @7:30pm: I think you are misinterpreting the data. Yes, the percent of messages to the top scores slopes downwards, but only because they are a small percentage of the population. They are plotting the fraction of the total messages, not the likelihood. (There are many fewer 5’s than 4’s, so there are fewer total messages to 5’s than to 4’s even though the 5’s get more.)
Look at the “Number of Messages Received vs. Recipient’s Attractiveness” graph, and you’ll see that better scores only increase the number of messages received— there is no drop-off.
I don’t think it’s news that appearance is just one factor in a woman’s consideration of her attraction of a man. It’s cliche, but men are visual and women are cerebral. This report doesn’t take into account the content of the profiles of which the individuals responded. Was the content not presented to the participants?
I find that spike in the message sent by males as really weird. It also makes me think that the least attractive guys will still think themselves too good for the least attractive females…sorta sucks. Also would like to volunteer my profile for the next trends study..figured it would be good for analysis.
This just reiterates what I have always said: women rate people more on how well they dress than how they look. Whenever a girl I know says another girl is cute what it means is: she dresses well, more than, she is attractive; whereas guys are looking at what’s on the inside, well of the clothes at least.
As the most attractive man on this site, I must say I am intrigued. The most attractive females only get a 50some percent reply rate from us? I don’t believe it.
Man I am average, and all this time my mom told me I was 5 stars. Dag!