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,

Fascinating and hilarious. Bravo!
And how interesting that White people were the ONLY racial group for which neither the phrase “different cultures” nor ANY reference to outside cultural influences appeared among the 50 most prevalent words in their dating profiles. Unless you count White girls and yoga.
The shock…I die.
If women who say they like “different cultures” are looking to date outside their race, that squares 100% with the crappy reply rates Middle Eastern men get from women, which was a prominent result in a previous post.
@rohan
Actually, my guess is that it represents a split between mystical and philosophical implementations of Buddhism since people tend to take mystical things more seriously.
Yeah I’m with Greg. Soul Food is a cuisine, movie and TV show…so no separation of these at all? I could see a situation where Black women have a higher affinity for the TV show and movie more than black men, but keeping the cuisine preference fairly stable. The fact that Black women also seem to love The Color Purple as their number two choice makes me think there is a likelihood Soul Food phrase is referring in part to the film or tv works?
I agree. Share the gay data.
This is seriously awesome and hilarious — great graphs!!! Do you guys use any special sort of pretty-graph-making software?
A correlation you neglected to mention is that Asian women are obviously obsessed with food (though not as much as Latinos are obsessed with dancing =D). Clearly, this is because you (Christian) are a white fucking dude. =P
So White women’s top “like” is the Red Sox? I think they are just saying they like the Red Sox so as to increase their odds of getting a date and I’ve never heard of any of the people white women like. Who the eff are Jodi Picoult, Nicholas Sparks, Nora Ephron, Ray Lamontagne, Kenny Chesney, Tim Mcgraw, Patricia Cornwell, and Carrie Underwood anyway? No wonder I never get layed anymore!
I like the data on religion….VERY TRUE. Wonder why some people get a bad name.
Good info here.
And to everyone that is “THATS RACIST” STFU. It’s called facts and they are right here.
Maybe if you fall into the categories that are appearing to be idiots then you should set yourself apart by NOT displaying such garbage.
Asians are often stereotyped as being intelligent, but Asian women are the only ones with the truly horrifying grammatical crime of apostrophe abuse: “Tuesday’s with Morrie.” Unless that’s some kind of data-scraping glitch. (And unless you count “mom’s” — but I’m assuming that was usually a proper possessive, often followed by “cooking” or “cuisine” or “advice” or something.)
I had no idea Thai food was so popular with Indian women or that Ayn Rand was so popular with Indian men. And Middle Eastern guys love Nickleback? Ugh!
Hilarious! Of course taken with a huge grain of salt. Although as a Latina, I am worried I seem to have little in common with not only my specific ethnicity, but most of the other females as well. Hmmm, maybe I need to talk about makeup and start listening to Reggaeton. Mmmm, maybe not.
Regarding the readability analyses — a profusion of ostentatiously polysyllabic vocabularies, albeit intimidating, dubiously represents an accurate assessment of intellectual achievements in companion-seeking participants.
Does OK Cupid cater to a particular socio-economic background or is there a certain socio-economic background of all races and ethnicities that is most likely to use the site?
Who Am i (Drek Zoolander Voice) i do like ground hog days the movie and La Confidental and entrouge i do like hip hop and i dance to it i like bachata(most hispanic music in general) but only listening to it.
I guess i am a american born and confused hispanic or american born and confused Latino
lol F iit
When you surveyed results, did you evenly distribute the profiles by age, gender, and race? If you didn’t I’d suspect the data would be far off as it would be no coincidence that for ex. the average white person enjoys “frat house” typed things if the majority surveyed were young males. Nonetheless great information as always and excellent presentation.
” the people who are most serious about not having faith (i.e. the “very serious” agnostics and atheists) score higher than any religious groups.”
Except non-serious Buddhists, although, to me, “non-serious Buddhist” reads as “trendy English major”, so basically “agnostic but lying about it”.
Okay, you guys love the topic of race so much.
While you are at it, can you now please add to option for people to chose what races they are willing to date. It will save a lot of us the time we spend messaging uninterested people.
thanks
Is it me, or does Alicia Keys have amazing cross-cultural appeal?
Very interesting post, however as someone stated above, I’d like to know how the data was collected at a much more thorough level.
I think it would be interesting to filter this by region e.g. find out what % of the people who use the word “NASCAR” live in the southern U.S.
@AC
“Also, in the broader population, agnostics outscore believers, and atheists are actually the lowest-scoring group (though OKCupid is probably not a representative sample, so it’s fair)”
You may have read that blog post wrong. The data is strictly about church going people who profess to be atheists. “To get at the issue HS considers, only those who attend church at least “several times a year” are included:” The people in this “data” are walking contradictions.
The correlation between lack of religion and intelligence is studied and a atheists do appear to be smarter than those with faith more often than not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence
Looking at the top 3 things for white women (Red Sox, Jodi Picoult, boating) that seems like a very New England-y list. Is the OKcupid population disproportionally located in New England? Or is there an effect here because New England is whiter than most regions?
I think there is a hidden variable when it comes to religion. Your an america centric site and there are a lot of dumb american christians, Could you break down religion’s reading grade by region and see if the trend holds in europe and may even be inverted in asia.
Thanks, RP
It’s nice how they add a disclaimer for no one to get upset about the racial graph of reading and writing proficiency, but then say that there should be a comic sans version of the Bible.
If you’re going to be sensitive (or insensitive) to groups of people, at least apply it equally.
AC… How is this stereotypical when it is factual evidence in its more pure form besides a database entry? You are either trolling, or stupid.
I think the reading/writing comprehension levels by racial group is not indicative of intelligence. Rather, it’s indicative of how seriously they take their profiles. Note that the three highest groups on that chart are also more likely to be discussing and mentioning their careers and education than the bottom three. They’re approaching it more as a resume/cover letter, whereas the bottom three talk more about pop culture and hobbies.
Funny that the Asian girls are all together on spelling “Tuesdays” wrong. Or was that you, OkCupid? I’d like to see the ratio of people who spelled it correctly vs. the incorrect apostrophe.
Oh man, I got pointed to this by Monica Hesse’s Washington Post chat. This is brilliant. A user of whatever race could potentially SEO (search-engine optimize) their own profile using these statistics and terms, and make adjustments — not to mention perform keyword searches — based on whatever race(s) they’re interested in meeting. That’s golden!
I’m not really sure why the topic of religious belief and education was tacked onto the end of this article on race. Shouldn’t this be made into a new topic?
But since it was, you forgot to mention Wiccans and New Agers.
i hate this honestly cuz it sets up stero types. Am not a stero type am a race. I like what i like because am me. Sure lots of people of one cultral might have pickd up and keepd a trend, dosent me we all like that same trend or the liking of that trend defines us. “Am not gonna spend my life being a color” – M.J.
@khichri: Yes…me too. You’ve got pretty much every ethnic group on the planet except for the ones first indigenous to North America.
Seems like Native Americans or Canadians get left out of a lot of these ‘studies’. We’re people and part of an ethnic group too, you know!!
Were the 526,000 OKCupid profiles used all from the Northeast in particular Boston, MA? I find it hard to believe the frequency of “the Red Sox” and “the dropkick murphys” show up in individual profiles especially if the profiles were sampled across the United States. Also is “I hope they server beer in hell” under “Stuff a Pacific Islanders like” a misspelling?
I would be more interested in learning how Coleman-Liau Index (CLI) compares with profiles stated education level. Or in other words, does a college education correspond to a higher writing proficiency level?
Christian,
Is this data readily available, or is there any way that I could do some of my own analysis using your data set? I think this is so interesting.
I, also, would like to see a version of this with gay/bi men and women. I’d guess the common interests would be much different from what would be typical for a straight person of the same race.
I’d love to see the actual proportions for some of these terms (how many white guys put Van fucking Halen, for example, which does fucking rule), as well as some of the correlates (how do certain tastes map onto messaging habits of gender, race, etc.).
But in any case, this isn’t “what ___ people like”; it’s what ___ people say they like in the context of trying to find a partner. Isn’t it pretty safe to assume those two things are different?
Let’s see, you make fun of white guys’ stated preferences, calling them a “sausagefest”. But when it comes to black guys, why they’re bold, and those latinos, you better laugh at their jokes otherwise they’ll beat your cracker ass down. How utterly predictable and unfunny.
Even the picture link to the survey has a white girl holding a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I’m all for racial humor, but why is it that it’s only ok to joke about whites, while every one else gets special treatment? Would you really have put a picture of a black guy pointing to a bucket of KFC in your link to the survey? Of course you wouldn’t have.
@AC
“Also, in the broader population, agnostics outscore believers, and atheists are actually the lowest-scoring group (though OKCupid is probably not a representative sample, so it’s fair)”
The link you quoted has a sample size of just 4400 people, compared to the >526k people sampled by okcupid, Furthermore, the non-believing sample size was just 2% compared to the national average, as reported by the 2008 census data, of 13%. In short, that link you used was crap and the okc data is probably much better.
Although these lists are specifically about racial outliers (differences), perhaps it would be valuable to address commonalities, as well. What non-filler phrases are common between races and how frequent are they compared to outliers? What percentage of, for example, the average white female’s profile consists of racial outliers? Stronger/weaker outliers? Distinguishing between filler and not adds undesirable subjectivity (and work), of course, but discussing people in terms of differences alone is misleading and only encourages people to see race as a distinct separation of one heap of humans from another.
Data is data, but choosing what to share and what not to share is definitely an expression of your opinion.
Atheists and agnostics might use a different set of vocabulary which portrays them as more educated. Might they insert larger words when a small, easily understood term would suffice? Richard Feynman, despite being a brilliant physicist, advocated the use of easily understood phrases.
Are Protestants and Catholics necessarily dumber than their non-believer counterparts, or do they just keep it simple across the board?
Why did you change the asian girl photo on the left side of the “our source” picture? Just curious
Nascar and baseball teams… hmmmmm Maybe this is a list of “Stuff White Women Think Guys are Looking For…”
Fun reading!
Why does this article never mention the connection that liking these things is why you’re on okcupid in the first place? i.e. Maybe people who like Harley Davidson and Nascar can’t find a date!
Anyone who is offended by this is clearly missing the point. Stereotypes and racism are all over America as it is. This is at least a fun, honest, and true way to see what similarities there are between people of different cultures.
I thought it was interesting that the only group that mentioned xbox and playstation was black guys. My co-worker pointed out that these profiles are meant to attract mates, so maybe that’s why other folks left it out.
Christian, you are my hero. Sorry I missed your band the last time you were in Amsterdam.
this article is an unfunny,lame joke, and it’s shit like this is why this country is still racially split i expected better from a 21 CENTURY Company
This is really broken on Opera, please fix it!
I just had to laugh at all of these-my profile is no where near these statistics. XD
I’d like a button to click that analyzes my okcupid profile text and tells me what percentage white, black, asian, etc that I am.
Hey People, remember this isn’t data from all white/black/whatever men/women, this is data from people who are on a dating site. Not all white women like Dirty Dancing (oh my God, wow). But apparently a lot of the single-and-looking ones do. I’m not really surprised! Hey ladies, please join us in the 21st century! Wow, I have more in common with Asian and Indian men than I do with my own white, female demographic. But then again, I’m married.
Yes, I said it! I’m a total bitch, I know. You’re welcome!
Would be interested to see top 50 #2 by group in addition to #2/#1, as well as the raw numbers.