» Men are Normal, Women are in Hell
In my culture, it is quite common to rate people on a 10-point scale of physical attractiveness. I think a lot of people don’t think very much about this scale when they’re using it. For example, it’s from 1 to 10 inclusive, so 5.5 is the middle of the scale.
I often suspect that people are using it as a uniform (flat) distribution. The subjects seem to be “9s” and “10s” more often than I would expect from a normal distribution with reasonable variance. And not surprisingly, the most common subjects below the middle are notably unattractive. I treat it as a normal distribution: chances are you’re a 5 or a 6.
OkCupid is an online dating site that I love for its four-factor Dating Persona Test. The site was built by four Harvard math grads. Kyla told me that they’ve started crunching numbers on users activity and publishing the results. (Statistical analysis is more legitimate than speed dating research, because they don’t pretend they’re in a laboratory where they can control all the variables.)
One of their best results is how men users rate the attractiveness of womens’ profile pictures and messages from men to women:
Men rate women on a normal distribution and disproportionately hit on attractive women. The old story about all the guys ignoring the most attractive woman because they assume she’s out of their league is confirmed.
Women, on the other hand, think all men are ugly:
But women will message ugly guys, as long as they’re not too ugly.
There’s another interesting one that popped up recently:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/01/20/the-4-big-myths-of-profile-pictures/
Ryley
21 Jan 10 at 10:13 am
This is all very interesting.
This quote from Ryley’s linked study made me feel bad about what (I assume) is Jared’s dominant strategy:
Apparently, trads and online dating sites do not mix well.
Don
21 Jan 10 at 10:56 am
More about Ryley’s study:
It said that body shots and “Myspace” photos result in more messages and that travel photos and doing-something-interesting photos result in fewer messages. Conversely, the percentage of messages that lead to a conversation was higher for travel photos and doing-something-interesting photos than for the body shots and “Myspace” photos.
I’d be interested to see these data combined: for each type of photo, how many conversations are likely to be started.
Don
21 Jan 10 at 11:07 am
@Don: It’s well accepted in the mens style community that women are most attracted to this outfit:
I go home and cry about rejection while I iron my shirts.
* Although I know a hot chick who is so far out as to prefer a long-sleeve grey t-shirt.
Jared
21 Jan 10 at 1:25 pm
I recently have a friend change the rating game up, by making it a binary rating system (1 or 0). This basically work out to: 0 = wont sleep with, 1 = will sleep with. It is interesting to see how the rating dynamic changes based if the person is in a relationship or not.
Fred
21 Jan 10 at 2:36 pm
The Ladder Theory site uses a 3-point scale.
Jared
21 Jan 10 at 4:32 pm
@Ryley: Awesome link.
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21 Jan 10 at 9:56 pm
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