Who Men Find Attractive vs Who They Date

10 Jan 2011

Once again, OkCupid has data-mined information from online dating profiles and actions to tell us how weird we are. Today they compare how “attractive” a woman’s pictures are, compared to how many times they get sent messages. Some of the interesting findings:

The more men disagree about a women’s looks, the more they like her.
Guys tend to ignore girls who are just cute.
If someone doesn’t think you’re hot, the next best thing is for them to think you’re ugly.

2 Responses to Who Men Find Attractive vs Who They Date

Spin Meister

January 10th, 2011 at 14:16

Intuitively I believe this as it does back up the “ugly” supermodels phenomonon and my own preferences, but the statistics are really thin. The .9 coeficient around “hot” is nearly all you need to know. The more 5s you get the more messages you get. The write up puts undue emphasis on the -.1 coeficient for 4 ratings without any mention of standard error of the estimate. Was this even significant? If so, is it important? No.

Given that M1 + M2 + M3 + M4 + M5 = 100%, the more ratings of 1-4 a woman gets, the fewer 5s. This seems to be nearly all of the story here, statistically speaking.

Scott

January 11th, 2011 at 15:59

I agree with Spin Meister, I’d like to see some discussion of the statistical significance. It’s still interesting. Even if the 0.4 coefficient on m1 wasn’t significant, it’s still far outside what I would have guessed the 99% confidence interval to be. The golden rule of academia applies here: More study (and funding) is required!

Assuming it is significant, there’s also an alternative explanation. They measured the number of messages, not the content of those messages. I wonder how often women on OkCupid get insulting messages.

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