4 ms·

Really-really interesting. I'm curious why asian females scored worst of all when asian males scored descent.

• hughprime 17y ago
  The differences on the race graph are so small as to be insignificant.
  • codexon 17y ago
    The reason is because at that point they already decided to interact with people of a different race. If you want a more interesting result, take a look at my other comment for a diagram that shows response rates between different races. It illustrates a greater schism that one would come to expect.
  • hughprime 17y ago
    Come to think of it, the differences on the race graph are amazingly small, given how strongly race is correlated with certain religions -- (e.g. middle-eastern people are much more likely to be Muslim, and almost all Hindus are Indian.)
    • swolchok 17y ago
      I think you're confusing P(member of particular race | member of particular religion) with P(member of particular religion | member of particular race).
      • hughprime 17y ago
        Hmm, nope, don't think so. I picked my words pretty carefully.
  • pyre 17y ago
    Keep in mind that the 'Match %' is based on OKCupid.com's algorithms that number crunch against quiz answers that the users answer. This has nothing to do with 'success rate' of users on the site hooking up with other users.
    • potatolicious 17y ago
      Right, so compare that with the message reply rate chart at the bottom of the article. Assuming the axes haven't changed from other charts on the page (which IMHO is a pretty good assumption)... It suggests that certain races have good matches with other races, but horrible reply rates. Reply rate may be the best metric okcupid has as to "success rate". It also suggests strong racial biases on the part of its users.
      • codexon 17y ago
        To elaborate more on your point: Many people claim they aren't racist when they refuse to date other races. They always say they haven't found the right <insert minority race here> guy/girl. What I've found from personal experience, is that the bar is set much higher for those minority races.
        • pyre 17y ago
          You can't attribute lack of attraction to racism. While it's possible for people to not date anyone of a certain race because they are bigoted against that race, I think that it's more common for people to just not feel a strong physical attraction towards certain races. My theory on this is that people that haven't grown up (at least during their childhood and/or teenage years) with many people of a certain race won't end up finding most of the 'feature' characteristics of that race to be attractive (i.e. if you grow up in a mostly white neighborhood you might not find black women attractive). I could be completely off-base here. I have no idea how the development of attraction in the brain works (and I'm sure there's probably much research into this area of psychology). But I tend to find that a lot of people (whether they admit to it or not) have a preference for certain races and not others. Sometimes people don't have a preference for their own race. I know Asian women that are not attracted at all to Asian men, but that doesn't stop them from having Asian men as friends and interacting with them. I would hardly think that they are bigoted against Asians (seeing as they are Asian themselves). > What I've found from personal experience, is that the bar is set much higher for those minority races. It's not necessarily minority races. There are plenty of people that are not attracted to others of their own race. 'Yellow-fever,' 'jungle-fever,' etc weren't created for 'one-off' instances (i.e. the person accused of having 'the fever' only dated a person of that race once, and doesn't have an affinity to dating persons of that race) of inter-racial dating/mating/marriage.
  • ilyak 17y ago
    Nope; the differences on the zodiac graph are. Differences on the race graph want to tell us something. Not necessarily something relevant, but something, anyway.