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Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back (WRT Online Dating)

61 points by noodle 17y ago

MarkPNeyer 17y ago
These findings don't surprise me at all. I've always been baffled as to why some people insist that Race, Culture, Gender, or Religion have no bearing on anything. The problem is that if you make a statement like "race is a predictor of academic success" you'll get labeled a racist.
- Anon84 17y ago
  The problem is that people confuse correlation with causation. A being a predictor for B does not mean that A causes B, just that A and B tend to occur together.
  - rsheridan6 17y ago
    Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'. (From http://xkcd.com/552/ http://xkcd.com/552/)
    - emmett 17y ago
      One might even say, well-controlled correlation implies causation. That's what experiments are for!
    - Anon84 17y ago
      Reread my comment... I never said it did, I just said that people tend to confuse the two.
- dkarl 17y ago
  if you make a statement like "race is a predictor of academic success" you'll get labeled a racist Not necessarily. Whoever you're talking to will carefully consider your language, tone, and any prior knowledge of you to figure out whether you're going to use your statement to support or attack their political beliefs, and then call you a racist as appropriate.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    The problem is a vast number of people don't bother with the consideration stage. (I attribute that to trash media personally; but that is a vague thought I haven't considered it too much) EDIT: pop psychology. most people are massively influenced by society. Society "on average" would probably judge such a statement as containing racist overtones. Gut jumps in because racism is an issue that we attach strong emotions too (rightly). It takes a strong Head to overcome emotions like that.
- kelnos 17y ago
  Sure, people like that are deluded. Race, culture, gender, and religion should have no bearing on anything, but in practice, they do. I'm not sure that a statement like the one you suggest would get you labeled racist, at least not among people who are capable of critical thinking. The fact remains that race is a predictor of academic success. It shouldn't be, but it is. To be a bit more socially sensitive, you might prefix that statement with "unfortunately," but I think that's one of the less-inflammatory things you can say that have a racial bent.
JacobAldridge 17y ago
I'm really enjoying this series of posts. Did anyone else think this one had a little more interpretative language, though? "sweethearts" "nails in coffins" or "schizophrenia of people’s racial attitudes" all seem to distract from letting the figures speak for themselves, and given the explosive potential in the figures I guess the less editorial comment the better. Edit - I'd also like to see a brief post that just looks at the zodiac chart. Would be the best place to send every zodiac-preacher I know to 'disprove' so much of what they argue (excepting the Capricorns, because they don't listen to evidence anyway).
- rsheridan6 17y ago
  >Did anyone else think this one had a little more interpretative language, though? "sweethearts" "nails in coffins" or "schizophrenia of people’s racial attitudes" all seem to distract from letting the figures speak for themselves, and given the explosive potential in the figures I guess the less editorial comment the better. Agreed. I have alternative interpretations. "sweetheart" -> "desperate," "shitty" (used to describe white guys who don't answer) -> "in a position to be choosy." Naturally, the more replies you get, the more picky you'll be.
  - shiranaihito 17y ago
    Right. Black women were the "sweethearts", and consistently found to be unfortunate in all of the categories. It also happens that black women are the only group I don't find attractive. Does that make me a racist? Especially when black males' answer to "would you strongly prefer to date someone of your own skin color" was a resounding "Hell no".. By the way, I've got one friend who doesn't like Asian women, and another who only likes Asian women. Go figure. ( I'm a white guy )
- deleted 17y ago
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- aston 17y ago
  The previous post and this one both show the same Zodiac chart, which demonstrates basically zero correlation between sign and match score: http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/races_and_religions/Match-By-Zodiac-Title.png http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/races_and_religions/Match-By-Zodi... Hard to write a full on article about no correlation.
tlrobinson 17y ago
While this is an interesting analysis, I don't think you should be labeled "racist" if you aren't attracted to people of races other than your own.
- mlinsey 17y ago
  Agreed. Are all non-bisexuals "sexist"? Maybe by some strict definition they are, but not in the ordinary sense we use the term, and to expand its definition to include those sorts of preferences might dilute the moral case against racism and sexism.
  - emmett 17y ago
    There's a clear difference between sex and race when it comes to, um, sex. Conflating the two doesn't make much sense in this instance.
    - rsheridan6 17y ago
      What is that difference? It's ok to discriminate based on sex but not on race? Why or why not?
      - codexon 17y ago
        So it's equally ok to discriminate on child bearing abilities and race? Hint: one of these attributes has a practical purpose in the perpetuation of human society, and the other does not.
        rsheridan6 17y ago
        That would only apply to people who intend to bear children. What if you're childfree and intend to remain that way, beyond your childbearing years, or you've had a vasectomy/tubal ligation? By your logic, would it not then be ok to discriminate based on race?
        17y ago
lionhearted 17y ago
This was a comment to the Okcupid post: > A lot of dating and who a person would consider for relationships is based on social, cultural and economic considerations, and it’s a simple and unfortunate fact that generally speaking whites are at the higher end of the social and economic spectrums. I just wanted to call that out in case anyone has been taught that way, but not had a chance to think it through clearly. Becoming successful doesn't make the rest of humanity less successful - it makes them more successful. It's not a "simple and unfortunate fact" that Vietnamese people immigrating to America revolutionized nail salons and made them affordable to almost all women while making themselves wealthy. It's not a "simple and unfortunate fact" that many of the greatest American scientists of the last 100 years have been Ashkenazi Jewish. And so on. It's not unfortunate when one group of people is succeeding - it brings up all of the rest of humanity. One group of people succeeding is not unfortunate; others failing is unfortunate and we can work to rectify that, but never feel guilty about succeeding and prospering.
- kgrin 17y ago
  The "unfortunate" comment seemed to be directed at the relative inequality, not the fact that whites are "succeeding". I think it's pretty tough to make the case that economic and educational inequality in the United States along racial lines is intrinsically a good thing, particularly given the historical context. Inequality may be the least-bad outcome given the menu of potential remedies ("Harrison Bergeron" and all that), but it's not a great thing in and of itself. Particularly given the historical and occasional modern-day evidence of straight-up racism (see: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DXK/is_9_20/ai_104521293/ http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DXK/is_9_20/ai_10452... ), I think it's reasonable to at least scrutinize situations of high inequality to figure out whether they are, in fact, just caused by some people working harder or being more lucky or what have you, or whether there are actual problems. On the merits, though, I think OKCupid's matching algorithm (the questions) theoretically accounts for the social, economic and cultural differences - what their data shows ("suggests" is probably more appropriate) is that people react to race even after controlling for the other factors, which is at least interesting. Edit: just to clarify and follow up - here's my claim: if the relative dominance of Ashkenazi Jews among American scientists, or Vietnamese women among nail-salon entrepreneurs, were the result of, say, discrimination, or government subsidies at others' expense, or some sort of other external factor that made the "competition" unfair, then it would be fair to categorize that inequality as "unfortunate". As far as I'm aware, that's not the case for either of those examples (and in fact is somewhat the opposite). But if it were (and the author of the original comment we're talking about seems to make that assumption about whites being better off on many socioeconomic measures), then calling that inequality "unfortunate" wouldn't be out of line.
johnnybgoode 17y ago
Did they take class into account at all? That could explain some of the results. Or even if they did, and all of these stats have been adjusted for class, carryover from class stereotypes could still explain the results.
- hughprime 17y ago
  There are a zillion factors which haven't been corrected for. As well as class, they include message length, message quality, profile quality, number of messages received on average by each class of respondee, income, education, number of cats owned and whether or not the man's profile consists of a shirtless photo posing in front of his Honda Civic (and I don't know why that mental image came to mind). I imagine you could, by using fake profiles and fake messages, do a controlled experiment which took all these factors out. My guess would be that you'd still see a vaguely similar effect but that it would be much less pronounced.
  - araneae 17y ago
    Agreed. I think message quality would be highly significant, because black males (not to generalize or anything) are much more likely to use netspeak such as "yo" or "wut" that we learned earlier were response killers. Of course, maybe the reason women don't like these words is because "yo" is a "black" word. I didn't even think about the money thing, but we do know that women care an awful lot about it. Who knows; a lot of the blatant racism towards black men (i.e. in the self report section) could be because women generalize that black men are poor. It could also explain why everyone seems to want to get with a white dude; he's more likely to be rich/have higher status.
llimllib 17y ago
> It’s ironic that white guys are worst responders Ironic means "surprising". When you just got done describing in detail how white males get the best response from all other potential mates, the fact that they respond the least is completely unsurprising.
- deleted 17y ago
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- vaksel 17y ago
  I don't think guy response rates are all that relevant. Let's face it, if a chick is the one reaching out to you, chances are she is of the lower caliber(a fatty). The good looking girls don't need to reach out, they get thousands of emails a month, they don't need to bother looking for guys.
  - llimllib 17y ago
    except that the authors were talking about relative response rates among men of different races.
  - theoneill 17y ago
    That would actually be higher caliber.
- psyklic 17y ago
  If a lot of people contact you, then you become more selective.
raganwald 17y ago
I'm confused by all the talk of the word "racist." The article didn't mention the word "racist" in the title, and in fact the one time it talked about the word, it was to debunk a straw man suggestion that racism is a factor. Are people dragging their^H^H^H^H^H^H own^H^H^H other baggage into this discussion?
- avibryant 17y ago
  Really? Maybe I misread, but I got the impression the author was presenting evidence in favor of, not against, the "white women are racist" statement. The way it's expressed ("nail in the coffin") is admittedly confusing, but in what way could he be said to be debunking it?
  - raganwald 17y ago
    Avi, I'll read it again, stand by for an edit ... I just read it as saying that White Women preferred to respond to White Men. Maybe it's my lack of baggage on the subject, I don't associate "Preferring White Shmeckle" with "Racism." To me, the word "racist" has all sorts of connotations around desiring a de-integration of society on colour lines, around various forms of employment discrimination, and around hate and fear. Expressing a preference when choosing a mate is not racism, nor is it particularly surprising.
    - deleted 17y ago
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    - llimllib 17y ago
      I agree with you on what racism means, but it certainly was my impression that the author does not agree, and is in fact conflating racial preference in mates with racism.
      - raganwald 17y ago
        Looks like all y'all're right and I was wrong. Ah well, I will turn my attention to another HN front page post, this one on Reading Incomprehension. Perhaps it might help me understand posts like this a little better :-)
emmett 17y ago
Interesting to me: rate of reply seems inversely correlated with likelihood of reply. That is, if you're likely to reply, other people are less likely to reply to you. My guess is that both of these things are correlated with social status. People with high social status are likely to be sought after (high rate of reply to their messages) and less likely to deign to reply (low rate of reply to others messages). It's well known that white males are perceived with highest social status, and black women with lowest, so these results make perfect sense in that context.
- tlrobinson 17y ago
  If you're more likely to reply, you're probably less picky. If you're less picky then you're likely to take the "shotgun" approach of messaging many people, regardless of whether it would be a good match. It shouldn't be surprising if a higher percentage of those people don't respond than to those who's approach is more targeted. But to confirm this we'd need to see the average number of messages sent by each group of people.
  - emmett 17y ago
    Average number of messages sent (and received) by race/gender would be a good control for this study, I agree. That's a good point.
kmcgivney 17y ago
In the article, the most staggering bias was white women's preference for white men, but also the general preference of women towards white men. Given that these stats are coming from the USA, I think our culture - television, movies, etc - provides us with ample images of white males in positions of success and power. Maybe this sways women's perceptions?
DavidSJ 17y ago
Correlation ≠ Causality. There's no controlled experiment here. Just a bunch of data mining, with some variables controlled for.
- dusklight 17y ago
  They never claimed causality. And they also state at the end of the article that they do not have a representative sample of the population. But if you do use the website and surf through some profiles, it becomes pretty clear that the majority of the users are, as the article states, younger, more educated, and more progressive than the average American. I would go even further and say that the vast majority of the users would not self-identify themselves as racist. Now question for OKCupid would be, wouldn't it be interesting if you could make a table showing the relationship of race to socioeconomic status, and then the breakdown of reply rate by socioeconomic status?
  - DavidSJ 17y ago
    You say, "they never claimed causality," but they say, "Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back" and "racism is alive and well".
- DavidSJ 17y ago
  For example, here's an alternative explanation consistent with their data: Perhaps black females are generally more solicitous, and send out lots of communications, being generally non-discriminatory about who they communicate with. This would explain both their own high reply rates and their recipients' low reply rates.
codexon 17y ago
I think this only confirmed what many people have known from experience. The most surprising part was the number of people who crawled out of the woodwork who wanted to declare the results invalid or deny the racism: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/9pbn8/dating_statistics_online_shows_that_asian_females/ http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/9pbn8/dating_statis... http://www.codexon.com/posts/okcupid-dating-statistics-shows-racism-very-much-alive#comments http://www.codexon.com/posts/okcupid-dating-statistics-shows... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851290 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851290
JesseAldridge 17y ago
This reminds me of a study my dad mentioned to me not too long ago... Here's the key graph: http://imgur.com/bFcOw.png http://imgur.com/bFcOw.png And his explanation: "They gave 77 white female Michigan State students several standard measures of racism at different times in their cycles. The "race bias" curve on the graph is a combination of the measures. Their interpretation is based on evolution, avoiding outgroup fathers who won't be around to take care of the mother and child. One problem I see with that interpretation is that it is better for evolution to mix genes as much as possible. I don't really have a better explanation, though." Also, this article seems relevant: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ReproductiveHealth/Story?id=4258128 http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ReproductiveHealth/Story?id=425... "marriages between third or fourth cousins in Iceland tended to produce more children and grandchildren than those between completely unrelated individuals"
hughprime 17y ago
There is, as I understand it, some evidence for the idea that people learn what's attractive in a member of the opposite sex by essentially averaging out all the faces which they see while growing up. This makes a helluva lot of sense as an evolutionary strategy -- you learn what your species looks like by observing as many other members as you can, and then you try to mate with the least unusual-looking person you can. Aside from protecting your offspring from the weird disability-causing genes which are sometimes signalled by unusual-looking features, it's also a great strategy if you assume everyone else is using it too: if you mate with a non-unusual looking partner you'll get non-unusual-looking kids, who will then be sought-after mating partners. Anyway, if our brains really do use this strategy I think it goes a long way towards explaining some of this data. edit: I don't mean to imply that this is the only criterion our brains use -- we probably find most attractive people who are slightly taller, more muscular and/or larger-breasted than the average we see while growing up. However in other things like facial structure where no particular face is objectively fitter than any other, heading towards the average is a pretty good plan.
pg 17y ago
Sometimes the comments on HN are more interesting than the article. This isn't one of those times. This article is full of surprises, whereas the comments are fairly predictable. I wonder what the pattern is. Which articles tend to yield boring comment threads? Ones that involve politics? Ones that invoke identity? What I'd really like to find are simple, automatic ways of detecting boring comment threads. I know one that works: more comments than points. Anyone have any suggestions for others?
- noodle 17y ago
  seems like most submissions that have more comments than points tend to be boring/predictable. not always, but its a good indicator, as controversial topics tend to have most comments fall into certain predictable buckets.
  - pg 17y ago
    Sorry, I was editing my comment to mention this while you were suggesting it. That does in fact work very well.
    - noodle 17y ago
      no worries. just off the top of my head, i'd say that there's probably some sort of relationship between the points on the submission and the average points per comment in the comments.
  - rooshdi 17y ago
    Plus, shocking or offensive comments are generally downgraded, even though they're not "boring" due to their controversial nature. It's also difficult to define what "boring" actually is since it has such a subjective meaning.
- rms 17y ago
  Blockquotes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859888 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859888
- 17y ago
parse_tree 17y ago
How the heck is a preference in who you date "racism"? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. People have strong preferences over all sorts of superficial things - body type, hair color, hair style, breast size, height, etc. Is it really so hard to believe that someone's preference for XXXX skin tone is just as shallow as their preference for YYYY hair color? (I've yet to see a commenter to a survey showing men prefer blonds point to it as evidence of some deep seated prejudice/hatred said men have towards women of other hair colors.)
Conservationist 17y ago
Biologically, the races are different. As someone concerned with maximal design, I am seeking someone similar but not identical to me, so am looking within my own racial and ethnic group. Obviously, it only makes sense to write back to those!
psyklic 17y ago
What is even more shocking to me are the comments on OK Cupid to this post. Many of the commenters who say they are black/Indian/etc seem to acceptingly resign themselves to saying they're part of "less desirable" or "undesirable" groups, as if as a person they are in fact undesirable. (e.g. "As a member of a particularly undesirable racial group, ..." or "Some of us less desirable types ...") The real shocker though is who advocates for restricting searches by race! From the comments, it is people who are part of undesirable groups who actually want OKC to be race-aware and allow people to discriminate. Clearly the data shows that there are biases toward certain races. However, from my experience, finding potential dates online is a roller coaster ride. It has ups and downs, and unfortunately we are always looking for what causes those downs. After all, people just reject you without a reason! With data like this, many people will just assume that RACE is the reason for rejection -- something they cannot do anything about -- when it is more likely something they can accommodate for. That is the real danger in reading too far into these studies -- dating is all about YOU, while these statistics are all about averages!

61 points by noodle 17y ago

These findings don't surprise me at all. I've always been baffled as to why some people insist that Race, Culture, Gender, or Religion have no bearing on anything. The problem is that if you make a statement like "race is a predictor of academic success" you'll get labeled a racist.

Anon84 17y ago
The problem is that people confuse correlation with causation. A being a predictor for B does not mean that A causes B, just that A and B tend to occur together.
- rsheridan6 17y ago
  Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'. (From http://xkcd.com/552/ http://xkcd.com/552/)
  - emmett 17y ago
    One might even say, well-controlled correlation implies causation. That's what experiments are for!
  - Anon84 17y ago
    Reread my comment... I never said it did, I just said that people tend to confuse the two.
dkarl 17y ago
if you make a statement like "race is a predictor of academic success" you'll get labeled a racist Not necessarily. Whoever you're talking to will carefully consider your language, tone, and any prior knowledge of you to figure out whether you're going to use your statement to support or attack their political beliefs, and then call you a racist as appropriate.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  The problem is a vast number of people don't bother with the consideration stage. (I attribute that to trash media personally; but that is a vague thought I haven't considered it too much) EDIT: pop psychology. most people are massively influenced by society. Society "on average" would probably judge such a statement as containing racist overtones. Gut jumps in because racism is an issue that we attach strong emotions too (rightly). It takes a strong Head to overcome emotions like that.
kelnos 17y ago
Sure, people like that are deluded. Race, culture, gender, and religion should have no bearing on anything, but in practice, they do. I'm not sure that a statement like the one you suggest would get you labeled racist, at least not among people who are capable of critical thinking. The fact remains that race is a predictor of academic success. It shouldn't be, but it is. To be a bit more socially sensitive, you might prefix that statement with "unfortunately," but I think that's one of the less-inflammatory things you can say that have a racial bent.

JacobAldridge 17y ago

I'm really enjoying this series of posts. Did anyone else think this one had a little more interpretative language, though? "sweethearts" "nails in coffins" or "schizophrenia of people’s racial attitudes" all seem to distract from letting the figures speak for themselves, and given the explosive potential in the figures I guess the less editorial comment the better. Edit - I'd also like to see a brief post that just looks at the zodiac chart. Would be the best place to send every zodiac-preacher I know to 'disprove' so much of what they argue (excepting the Capricorns, because they don't listen to evidence anyway).

rsheridan6 17y ago
>Did anyone else think this one had a little more interpretative language, though? "sweethearts" "nails in coffins" or "schizophrenia of people’s racial attitudes" all seem to distract from letting the figures speak for themselves, and given the explosive potential in the figures I guess the less editorial comment the better. Agreed. I have alternative interpretations. "sweetheart" -> "desperate," "shitty" (used to describe white guys who don't answer) -> "in a position to be choosy." Naturally, the more replies you get, the more picky you'll be.
- shiranaihito 17y ago
  Right. Black women were the "sweethearts", and consistently found to be unfortunate in all of the categories. It also happens that black women are the only group I don't find attractive. Does that make me a racist? Especially when black males' answer to "would you strongly prefer to date someone of your own skin color" was a resounding "Hell no".. By the way, I've got one friend who doesn't like Asian women, and another who only likes Asian women. Go figure. ( I'm a white guy )
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aston 17y ago
The previous post and this one both show the same Zodiac chart, which demonstrates basically zero correlation between sign and match score: http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/races_and_religions/Match-By-Zodiac-Title.png http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/races_and_religions/Match-By-Zodi... Hard to write a full on article about no correlation.

tlrobinson 17y ago

While this is an interesting analysis, I don't think you should be labeled "racist" if you aren't attracted to people of races other than your own.

mlinsey 17y ago
Agreed. Are all non-bisexuals "sexist"? Maybe by some strict definition they are, but not in the ordinary sense we use the term, and to expand its definition to include those sorts of preferences might dilute the moral case against racism and sexism.
- emmett 17y ago
  There's a clear difference between sex and race when it comes to, um, sex. Conflating the two doesn't make much sense in this instance.
  - rsheridan6 17y ago
    What is that difference? It's ok to discriminate based on sex but not on race? Why or why not?
    - codexon 17y ago
      So it's equally ok to discriminate on child bearing abilities and race? Hint: one of these attributes has a practical purpose in the perpetuation of human society, and the other does not.
      - rsheridan6 17y ago
        That would only apply to people who intend to bear children. What if you're childfree and intend to remain that way, beyond your childbearing years, or you've had a vasectomy/tubal ligation? By your logic, would it not then be ok to discriminate based on race?
        17y ago

lionhearted 17y ago

This was a comment to the Okcupid post: > A lot of dating and who a person would consider for relationships is based on social, cultural and economic considerations, and it’s a simple and unfortunate fact that generally speaking whites are at the higher end of the social and economic spectrums. I just wanted to call that out in case anyone has been taught that way, but not had a chance to think it through clearly. Becoming successful doesn't make the rest of humanity less successful - it makes them more successful. It's not a "simple and unfortunate fact" that Vietnamese people immigrating to America revolutionized nail salons and made them affordable to almost all women while making themselves wealthy. It's not a "simple and unfortunate fact" that many of the greatest American scientists of the last 100 years have been Ashkenazi Jewish. And so on. It's not unfortunate when one group of people is succeeding - it brings up all of the rest of humanity. One group of people succeeding is not unfortunate; others failing is unfortunate and we can work to rectify that, but never feel guilty about succeeding and prospering.

kgrin 17y ago
The "unfortunate" comment seemed to be directed at the relative inequality, not the fact that whites are "succeeding". I think it's pretty tough to make the case that economic and educational inequality in the United States along racial lines is intrinsically a good thing, particularly given the historical context. Inequality may be the least-bad outcome given the menu of potential remedies ("Harrison Bergeron" and all that), but it's not a great thing in and of itself. Particularly given the historical and occasional modern-day evidence of straight-up racism (see: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DXK/is_9_20/ai_104521293/ http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DXK/is_9_20/ai_10452... ), I think it's reasonable to at least scrutinize situations of high inequality to figure out whether they are, in fact, just caused by some people working harder or being more lucky or what have you, or whether there are actual problems. On the merits, though, I think OKCupid's matching algorithm (the questions) theoretically accounts for the social, economic and cultural differences - what their data shows ("suggests" is probably more appropriate) is that people react to race even after controlling for the other factors, which is at least interesting. Edit: just to clarify and follow up - here's my claim: if the relative dominance of Ashkenazi Jews among American scientists, or Vietnamese women among nail-salon entrepreneurs, were the result of, say, discrimination, or government subsidies at others' expense, or some sort of other external factor that made the "competition" unfair, then it would be fair to categorize that inequality as "unfortunate". As far as I'm aware, that's not the case for either of those examples (and in fact is somewhat the opposite). But if it were (and the author of the original comment we're talking about seems to make that assumption about whites being better off on many socioeconomic measures), then calling that inequality "unfortunate" wouldn't be out of line.

johnnybgoode 17y ago

Did they take class into account at all? That could explain some of the results. Or even if they did, and all of these stats have been adjusted for class, carryover from class stereotypes could still explain the results.

hughprime 17y ago
There are a zillion factors which haven't been corrected for. As well as class, they include message length, message quality, profile quality, number of messages received on average by each class of respondee, income, education, number of cats owned and whether or not the man's profile consists of a shirtless photo posing in front of his Honda Civic (and I don't know why that mental image came to mind). I imagine you could, by using fake profiles and fake messages, do a controlled experiment which took all these factors out. My guess would be that you'd still see a vaguely similar effect but that it would be much less pronounced.
- araneae 17y ago
  Agreed. I think message quality would be highly significant, because black males (not to generalize or anything) are much more likely to use netspeak such as "yo" or "wut" that we learned earlier were response killers. Of course, maybe the reason women don't like these words is because "yo" is a "black" word. I didn't even think about the money thing, but we do know that women care an awful lot about it. Who knows; a lot of the blatant racism towards black men (i.e. in the self report section) could be because women generalize that black men are poor. It could also explain why everyone seems to want to get with a white dude; he's more likely to be rich/have higher status.

llimllib 17y ago

> It’s ironic that white guys are worst responders Ironic means "surprising". When you just got done describing in detail how white males get the best response from all other potential mates, the fact that they respond the least is completely unsurprising.

deleted 17y ago
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vaksel 17y ago
I don't think guy response rates are all that relevant. Let's face it, if a chick is the one reaching out to you, chances are she is of the lower caliber(a fatty). The good looking girls don't need to reach out, they get thousands of emails a month, they don't need to bother looking for guys.
- llimllib 17y ago
  except that the authors were talking about relative response rates among men of different races.
- theoneill 17y ago
  That would actually be higher caliber.
psyklic 17y ago
If a lot of people contact you, then you become more selective.

raganwald 17y ago

I'm confused by all the talk of the word "racist." The article didn't mention the word "racist" in the title, and in fact the one time it talked about the word, it was to debunk a straw man suggestion that racism is a factor. Are people dragging their^H^H^H^H^H^H own^H^H^H other baggage into this discussion?

avibryant 17y ago
Really? Maybe I misread, but I got the impression the author was presenting evidence in favor of, not against, the "white women are racist" statement. The way it's expressed ("nail in the coffin") is admittedly confusing, but in what way could he be said to be debunking it?
- raganwald 17y ago
  Avi, I'll read it again, stand by for an edit ... I just read it as saying that White Women preferred to respond to White Men. Maybe it's my lack of baggage on the subject, I don't associate "Preferring White Shmeckle" with "Racism." To me, the word "racist" has all sorts of connotations around desiring a de-integration of society on colour lines, around various forms of employment discrimination, and around hate and fear. Expressing a preference when choosing a mate is not racism, nor is it particularly surprising.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - llimllib 17y ago
    I agree with you on what racism means, but it certainly was my impression that the author does not agree, and is in fact conflating racial preference in mates with racism.
    - raganwald 17y ago
      Looks like all y'all're right and I was wrong. Ah well, I will turn my attention to another HN front page post, this one on Reading Incomprehension. Perhaps it might help me understand posts like this a little better :-)

emmett 17y ago

Interesting to me: rate of reply seems inversely correlated with likelihood of reply. That is, if you're likely to reply, other people are less likely to reply to you. My guess is that both of these things are correlated with social status. People with high social status are likely to be sought after (high rate of reply to their messages) and less likely to deign to reply (low rate of reply to others messages). It's well known that white males are perceived with highest social status, and black women with lowest, so these results make perfect sense in that context.

tlrobinson 17y ago
If you're more likely to reply, you're probably less picky. If you're less picky then you're likely to take the "shotgun" approach of messaging many people, regardless of whether it would be a good match. It shouldn't be surprising if a higher percentage of those people don't respond than to those who's approach is more targeted. But to confirm this we'd need to see the average number of messages sent by each group of people.
- emmett 17y ago
  Average number of messages sent (and received) by race/gender would be a good control for this study, I agree. That's a good point.

kmcgivney 17y ago

In the article, the most staggering bias was white women's preference for white men, but also the general preference of women towards white men. Given that these stats are coming from the USA, I think our culture - television, movies, etc - provides us with ample images of white males in positions of success and power. Maybe this sways women's perceptions?

DavidSJ 17y ago

Correlation ≠ Causality. There's no controlled experiment here. Just a bunch of data mining, with some variables controlled for.

dusklight 17y ago
They never claimed causality. And they also state at the end of the article that they do not have a representative sample of the population. But if you do use the website and surf through some profiles, it becomes pretty clear that the majority of the users are, as the article states, younger, more educated, and more progressive than the average American. I would go even further and say that the vast majority of the users would not self-identify themselves as racist. Now question for OKCupid would be, wouldn't it be interesting if you could make a table showing the relationship of race to socioeconomic status, and then the breakdown of reply rate by socioeconomic status?
- DavidSJ 17y ago
  You say, "they never claimed causality," but they say, "Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back" and "racism is alive and well".
DavidSJ 17y ago
For example, here's an alternative explanation consistent with their data: Perhaps black females are generally more solicitous, and send out lots of communications, being generally non-discriminatory about who they communicate with. This would explain both their own high reply rates and their recipients' low reply rates.

codexon 17y ago

I think this only confirmed what many people have known from experience. The most surprising part was the number of people who crawled out of the woodwork who wanted to declare the results invalid or deny the racism: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/9pbn8/dating_statistics_online_shows_that_asian_females/ http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/9pbn8/dating_statis... http://www.codexon.com/posts/okcupid-dating-statistics-shows-racism-very-much-alive#comments http://www.codexon.com/posts/okcupid-dating-statistics-shows... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851290 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851290

JesseAldridge 17y ago

This reminds me of a study my dad mentioned to me not too long ago... Here's the key graph: http://imgur.com/bFcOw.png http://imgur.com/bFcOw.png And his explanation: "They gave 77 white female Michigan State students several standard measures of racism at different times in their cycles. The "race bias" curve on the graph is a combination of the measures. Their interpretation is based on evolution, avoiding outgroup fathers who won't be around to take care of the mother and child. One problem I see with that interpretation is that it is better for evolution to mix genes as much as possible. I don't really have a better explanation, though." Also, this article seems relevant: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ReproductiveHealth/Story?id=4258128 http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ReproductiveHealth/Story?id=425... "marriages between third or fourth cousins in Iceland tended to produce more children and grandchildren than those between completely unrelated individuals"

hughprime 17y ago

There is, as I understand it, some evidence for the idea that people learn what's attractive in a member of the opposite sex by essentially averaging out all the faces which they see while growing up. This makes a helluva lot of sense as an evolutionary strategy -- you learn what your species looks like by observing as many other members as you can, and then you try to mate with the least unusual-looking person you can. Aside from protecting your offspring from the weird disability-causing genes which are sometimes signalled by unusual-looking features, it's also a great strategy if you assume everyone else is using it too: if you mate with a non-unusual looking partner you'll get non-unusual-looking kids, who will then be sought-after mating partners. Anyway, if our brains really do use this strategy I think it goes a long way towards explaining some of this data. edit: I don't mean to imply that this is the only criterion our brains use -- we probably find most attractive people who are slightly taller, more muscular and/or larger-breasted than the average we see while growing up. However in other things like facial structure where no particular face is objectively fitter than any other, heading towards the average is a pretty good plan.

pg 17y ago

Sometimes the comments on HN are more interesting than the article. This isn't one of those times. This article is full of surprises, whereas the comments are fairly predictable. I wonder what the pattern is. Which articles tend to yield boring comment threads? Ones that involve politics? Ones that invoke identity? What I'd really like to find are simple, automatic ways of detecting boring comment threads. I know one that works: more comments than points. Anyone have any suggestions for others?

noodle 17y ago
seems like most submissions that have more comments than points tend to be boring/predictable. not always, but its a good indicator, as controversial topics tend to have most comments fall into certain predictable buckets.
- pg 17y ago
  Sorry, I was editing my comment to mention this while you were suggesting it. That does in fact work very well.
  - noodle 17y ago
    no worries. just off the top of my head, i'd say that there's probably some sort of relationship between the points on the submission and the average points per comment in the comments.
- rooshdi 17y ago
  Plus, shocking or offensive comments are generally downgraded, even though they're not "boring" due to their controversial nature. It's also difficult to define what "boring" actually is since it has such a subjective meaning.
rms 17y ago
Blockquotes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859888 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859888
17y ago

parse_tree 17y ago

How the heck is a preference in who you date "racism"? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. People have strong preferences over all sorts of superficial things - body type, hair color, hair style, breast size, height, etc. Is it really so hard to believe that someone's preference for XXXX skin tone is just as shallow as their preference for YYYY hair color? (I've yet to see a commenter to a survey showing men prefer blonds point to it as evidence of some deep seated prejudice/hatred said men have towards women of other hair colors.)

Conservationist 17y ago

Biologically, the races are different. As someone concerned with maximal design, I am seeking someone similar but not identical to me, so am looking within my own racial and ethnic group. Obviously, it only makes sense to write back to those!

psyklic 17y ago

What is even more shocking to me are the comments on OK Cupid to this post. Many of the commenters who say they are black/Indian/etc seem to acceptingly resign themselves to saying they're part of "less desirable" or "undesirable" groups, as if as a person they are in fact undesirable. (e.g. "As a member of a particularly undesirable racial group, ..." or "Some of us less desirable types ...") The real shocker though is who advocates for restricting searches by race! From the comments, it is people who are part of undesirable groups who actually want OKC to be race-aware and allow people to discriminate. Clearly the data shows that there are biases toward certain races. However, from my experience, finding potential dates online is a roller coaster ride. It has ups and downs, and unfortunately we are always looking for what causes those downs. After all, people just reject you without a reason! With data like this, many people will just assume that RACE is the reason for rejection -- something they cannot do anything about -- when it is more likely something they can accommodate for. That is the real danger in reading too far into these studies -- dating is all about YOU, while these statistics are all about averages!