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,

Urm… frat boys are generally not in to things like NOFX, Bad Religion, Frank Zappa, Robert Heinlein, The Dark Tower, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or Phish. So, no, this does not resemble a frathouse.
At least have some idea what you’re talking about if you’re going to be writing an article.
You should do this with gay men and women too! I know the population size isn’t as large, but there should still be a good amount.
Here’s my prediction: #1, Lady Gaga
The women of each race like books that apply to their own race. So Latinas are all about Isabelle Allende, and black girls loved The Color Purple. Muslims have The Kite Runner, and Indians have both The Namesake (which I realize was also a movie) and Jhumpa Lahiri
And white chicks like Jodi Picoult and Nicholas Sparks. Fuck.
I think non-heterosexuals would have strikingly different results in each racial category, except maybe with Pacific Islanders and Asians, among whom GLBTs are less marginalized (in my experience as someone who is Asian, Oceanic, and White).
Christian can you please clarify how I’m a simple man ended up on that list if the process is as you described, or did you leave out a/an/the?
I must say i enjoyed earlier articles more since they seemed less prone to be abused for supporting ones prejudices and more informative. Maybe i just have a hard time making anything else out of this than flame bait.
What seems shocking is the low overall level of writing proficiency but i guess this is mainly due to the bullet list style in which a lot of profiles are written.
So extremely religious people are not very interested in learning proper grammar and prefer to remain ignorant. No shock there.
This is a wonderful insight to not just the people on this site but to people everywhere. I really enjoyed reading this one, I’d say the it’s the best trend article yet. Keep up the great work!
I agree…this is not stereotyping. Cultural differences are a fact and could be embraced, experienced and celebrated within each culture and cross-cultural!! I found this interesting and humourous! I am not in line with what typical white women like….but found it interesting all the same!
The “fucking rule’ is totally hilarious!!
I doubt this was meant to be taken seriously so it makes no sense for anyone to be offended. It’s not like they pulled this data out of nowhere; just as D commented, the people involved sterotyped themselves. I found it hilarious. Thanks OkC!
I don’t believe anything I mention in my profile is on the stuff black people like list, lol.
A very interesting read!
ComicSans? Are you kidding? Everyone knows the bible was written in Papyrus.
It’d be awesome if we could search/filter profiles based on:
– writing proficiency level
– religious seriousness
I have a conjecture about the religion writing proficiency level correlation demonstrated here.
– I assume OK cupid is mostly a U.S. site.
– An aside: the grade level difference between lowest proficiency (protestant) and highest proficiency (atheist) is less than 1.5 grade levels
– I assume that recent immigrants to the U.S. with less prior exposure to English and less formal education, those who tend to live in large non-English-speaking enclaves, and those whose professions do not require frequent/constant reading and writing in the English language will tend to score lower on the writing proficiency exams.
– An outsized representation of people matching the prior point within any one religious group will significantly lower the average writing proficiency level for that group.
– There will be relatively few low-skilled, enclaved, and low-English-exposure immigrants in the agnostic, jewish, buddhist, and atheist groups, and perhaps a few more in the muslim and hindu communities.
– The large immigrant hispanic community here in the U.S. is largely catholic and evangelical protestant and has to some extent a lower education level, less English exposure, can live in mostly-Spanish-speaking enclaves, and speak, read, and write English as part of typical jobs less than those in other immigrant communities.
– OK Cupid does not particularly select for the more educated slice of any religious group — it’s easy to create a profile (the subscription base for the Economist, on the other hand, would self-select for those with a higher education level). OK Cupid profiles will reflect a broad range of education levels within any given religious group.
– buddhism is a religion optimized for happiness and not for truth and so appeals to one segment of the present highly educated portion of the American public — pushing writing proficiency levels higher for that group. I assume buddhist immigrants also likely have higher education levels.
– atheism/agnoticism are philosophies optimized for justifying hopelessness and so appeal to another segment of the present highly educated portion of the American public — pushing writing proficiency levels higher for that group.
CONCLUSION: the English-language writing proficiency level for catholic and protestant groups in this analysis is lowered by a significant representation of hispanic immigrants. These immigrants have lower educational barriers for entering the U.S. Their more educated compatriots have no need and desire to come to the U.S. as life is good for them where they are.
Interesting that the asians and pacific islanders list “swingers” — hmmmm…..
Just curious – this is only showing the relative frequency of the words and topics that were distinctly popular for a specific race. But I would like to know how important these topics are to people, compared to the topics that are popular among all races. For example, here we see that when you look at the list of things that are much more important to black women than to other races, soul food tops the list. But if you showed all the things black women were interested in, where would soul food be in the list? I bet it would not be at the top!
Anyway, just curious how popular the race-specific topics are, compared to topics that everyone has on their list. Is there a way to show this data?
I love that OkCupid is willing to invest resources in this, fabulous! My concern with this analysis is that because this is a dating site, people don’t represent themselves accurately, but rather represent themselves in the way they best think will attract another person.
Thus, the results may just be a reflection of what people think other people find attractive, rather than what the actual culture of each group is like. Then this analysis is really just revealing the stereotypes that exist in society for each cultural group.
This is completely hilarious! I love this!
To everyone who can’t take a joke: get a life. – This article is not serious and if you get offended, that’s your bad. It’s a good read and meant for entertainment, thus pull the stick out of your butt and enjoy life already.
Thanks AJ!
You said that black women were the only ones that mentioned someone of another race (Justin Timberlake) but Asian women mentioned Alicia Keys, who is part black and part white.
Did it ever occur to you that this could be offensive?
This is some of the most interesting data I’ve seen on the internet in a long, long time. Nice job.
I am still laughing over the “expert tautologist” comment. You guys are the best!
Very interesting study. The only problem I have with this study is that it encourages more ignorance and stereotyping. I’m a 41 year old black male and I can honestly say that I don’t completely identify with either race with what I read that they like. What about the people that are their own person and don’t follow the crowd? I guess I’m screwed. LOL To me this study just breaks down race and puts everybody in a box. If you’re going to judge a person that you meet by going by this study before even getting to know them you’re a fool.
What’s more interesting here is that this isn’t necessarily an accurate view of people’s likes and dislikes. It’s how people try to present themselves on OKCupid, a dating site. I know when I wrote my profile it didn’t actually say every thing I liked. In some cases, I ignored things that I thought would be outliers for myself and give the wrong impression if taken in such a limited context. (No one needs to know on OKCupid just how much I play video games. That’s a treat to discover.) So what I see here is a lot of people putting together dating profiles in such a way that they are trying to emphasize that they are proud of their backgrounds and making sure potential dates know they are a “real” member of their culture before getting into the stuff that makes them unique. In general, I think people are worried that just putting what makes them different will get them overlooked, so they’ll try to couch it in phrases that emphasize that, overall, they’re not so different as to be undatable.
Or maybe that’s just me.
This site uses the most ridiculously small font. Seriously, what’s up with that? Why does your font have to be so much smaller than everyone else’s?
As always, it is a very interesting and iconoclastic post ! The question is very relevant, as showed by very eloquent results, but perhaps a bit more accuracy would have been reached, had a distinction been made between US-Americans (still the majority of the population of your site) and other origins. (And I tend to agree with LeeLeo too, about non heterosexual profiles between atypical.)
I’ve talked with close to 150 guys and the only word or expression from the “white men” I’ve seen even ONCE is The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy (and perhaps guitar, too) ; as for the latinos, it’s a bit truer and I don’t have enough contacts with other origins to speak for, but I think they were exceptions anyway.
On the contrary, in all your elements from “white girls”, I only mentioned mascara in my profile (I was bluffed when it appeared, ok !) and I can recognize myself in the taste for thunderstoms (only in the city, though, the muddy countryside during a thunderstorm doesn’t have much appeal !). That’s all. Among the girls I’ve talked with, I can’t recognize them either.
So, yeah, perhaps US and outside is a big difference. Or perhaps only uncharacteristic people talk to me.
To those people complaining about the racial profiling…
Let’s look at this from the opposite perspective. How many people feel compelled to act a certain way, because of their race?? You can see examples of this social phenomenon all the time. The sad thing is that people can always justify complaining about racial stereotypes, but never own up to the fact that they actively contribute to them.
I simply refuse to believe that many white people like Tom Clancy.
Did you poll just popped collars, the south, and 40+ year old republicans?
It might be interesting to see if controlling for the income level that people specify in their profile changes the results at all.
Cool, have you tried reversing your data? What’s the accuracy for predicting gender (my guess high) religion and ethnicity?
Looking forward to the results on gays, I think they might not be so clearly delineated by race or gender. Religion should be interesting
Interesting!
Black and Latino men like Xbox360 whilst Middle Eatern guys play Playstation. Pacific Islanders are “surfing” the internet whilst Asian and Indian men are arguing which is more impressive – software developer or software engineer.
White guys manage to get “software” in there but are completely non-committal about it. “I like software – it rocks”???
And no male race said they liked internet porn. Is the industry about to go out of business???
keep in mind this is a dating site and the things listed aren’t necessarily what the posters like but what they think people they would want to date might like to hear.
So Europeans are not “white people” because they don’t read really bad American “literature” like Tom Clancy or listen to crappy bands like Van Halen? You should specify you meant you American white trash, not people with taste, class and education. Red Sox? Golfing? Is that some of the fat people’s substitute for sports you do in America? Buy yourselves globes of the US, you self-indulgent illiterate idiots.
Now it’d be _really_ interesting to do the same sort of analysis with race-gender-region pairs, i.e. how are black women in the North East different from black women in the South, different from black women on the West Coast.
You must also take into consideration that your sample set is composed of people who are sufficiently inept at normal human interaction that they have to resort to posting profiles on Internet dating sites in the hopes that some anonymous stranger might find them attractive.
I think that your conclusions about religion might be more likely to be: The more religious people are, the more desperate they have to get before they’ll put themselves on the internet meat market.
It’s important, in any statistical analysis, to acknowledge that there are GOBS of variables that weren’t even considered.
A few more interesting things:
-Indian men and women both have books by the same author on their list, but The Kite Runner is higher for men and A Thousand Splendid Suns is higher for women. Middle Eastern, women, however, tend to prefer The Kite Runner.
-Women have many more male artists/authors on their profiles than men have female artists or authors.
-Women are more likely to mention their education.
-Some races seem to prefer fiction over non-fiction, or vice versa.
-Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, and Pacific Islander women all mention “chocolate”, whereas white women specifically like “diet coke”.
Christian:
After giving up Facebook and Twitter, articles like this one remind me why I’m sticking with OKC.
Fantastic job!
I’m white and i don’t care to post obvious things on Facebook such as i like girls etc. I also would like you to proofread this post to see how a Christian actually types. Very interesting but Facebook information is not actually something you can do scientific research on since people’s interests change frequently and unless you are a COMPLETE social recluse you don’t change the interests portion of facebook all that often.
Regarding the writing proficiency results broken down by religion: The Christians read at a sub-8th grade level, which is, of course, embarrassing. But the “smartest” groups out there, Buddhists and atheists, read at sub-9th grade levels. (Cue hilarious jokes about the Comic Sans versions of the Buddhavacana and Epicurus.) Doesn’t that just mean that the OkCupid demographic as a whole is a little retarded?
Keep in mind that these are also influenced by where these races are concentrated more. I’m guessing a LOT of the Indians on this site are actually from India (or England). Your average Indian guy living in America isn’t going to know much about cricket, generally speaking.
But then, an Indian guy in America can hardly be called “average” to begin with.
It looks like I should be Asian, Indian or a Pacific Islander! I relate to those lists WAY more than I relate to the white boy list! lol
It’s interesting that black men and Asian women seem to be the only ethnic-gender groups who have any good taste in music. Specifically, that black men cite Mos Def as their favorite rapper more often than any other, with the list being mostly filled out by less-gangster acts (Lupe, the Roots, etc.). They’re all well known hip hop acts, but it’s not the distribution you’d hear on the radio. At the other end, Asian women were the only grouping to prominently mention an indie band (the xx), although they still like Alicia Keyes more.
[/music snob]
I agree that it would be interesting to see these same types of results separated out by sexual orientation, although the smaller sample size would introduce a lot of noise.
I’d be really curious how multiraciality affects the data. Fascinating.
I’d love to see a breakdown of the personality tab by sexual orientation, gender, race and religion. That would make for an interesting article!
This was a funny read. I’ve been told more than once that they’d think I was white had I not had a profile pic posted. I guess until you get to the “lip gloss”.
I remember when I used to flagmod that “god-fearing” was a disappointingly diagnostic giveaway to those 419 scammers. It could be there are a lot of fake profiles that made their way into the grinder, and the prominence of that phrase might be lower if profiles were excluded that are inactive, deleted, flagged, or just idle for more than n months.
statistics are ballsy
Wow, the methodology has always been very clearly explained. The author need not use words to explain everything, the data (seen via the graphs) says it all. Things to remember:
1) The sampling population is not *all* people of x ethnicity. As said at the beginning of the piece, it was the profiles 526,000 randomly selected OkCupid users and their self-stated ethnicity. That means that the sample is inherently self-selecting (the “kind” of people that would be on OkCupid or any online dating site in the first place). There are other kinds of statistical issues that I’m sure the author is aware of (sampling bias), but too many of the commenters seem to never have taken an intro statistics course.
2) The data is based on what OkCupid users actually say of themselves, and at no point do the authors say, or even imply, that people x are y (i.e. Athiests are smarter than everyone else). One does have to remember that what you’re seeing on OkCupid is a face people *know* others will see.
Conclusion: Remember what the sample population is, and know that the face people present to the world may not be who they truly are on the inside. That said, there’s a lot of interesting associations in the data presented.
You said that black women were the only ones to list someone of a different race. But asian women listed Alicia Keys.
This was really interesting; I’m especially intrigued that Alicia Keys seems to be a unanimous favorite amongst women of all races.
I’m also curious about why none of the averages for the Grade Level of personal essays go above 10th grade. I’m not really familiar with the Coleman-Liau index, do most people (regardless of education) write at below 10th grade level or is this something unique to people who join online dating sites? I’m not trying to insult anyone here, just genuinely curious. Most online daters should be well above the age of 14, correct? I’ve read some of my own 9th grade papers recently and there is a significant difference in how I wrote then compared to how I write now (I’m 22). I’m curious if even with a college education, many people, myself included are under the impression that we have a good grasp of the english language when in fact… maybe we really don’t.
I also wonder if bilingual people suffer in this grading system. What about people who switch back and forth or intersperse phrases from another language with English in their profiles? How does that affect the grading? I’m definitely curious since Asians/Middle Eastern/Indian people scored the highest… of course, being Asian doesn’t necessarily make you bilingual.
Pacific Islander girls like Alicia Keys, someone of another race