Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Data mining tells us that chicks dig good looking jerks and guys like bikini hotties

I'm sure that caught you unawares.  The online dating site OKCupid has been doing some experiments, like not showing any photos of its users to see if it changed dating behavior:
When the site restored photographs to the site, it found those conversations dried up: "It was like we’d turned on the bright lights at the bar at midnight," Rudder said. Those who stuck with it and went on a date generally reported they had as good a time as if they'd met someone with a full profile, although Rudder notes that women who dated attractive men had slightly worse dates – which he attributed to them being more likely to be "assholes."

The second experiment stems from when OKCupid users were asked to rate profiles on the attractiveness and the personality of a stranger. The study found that profile text accounts for less than 10 per cent of the perceived attractiveness of people.

For example, we're told one profile had no text at all, just a picture of a nubile young lady in a bikini. Despite the lack of anything other than a picture in her profile she apparently scored in the top 99 per cent for personality. Yes, it seems we really are that shallow, it seems.
So chicks dig good looking jerks, and men think that bikini hotties have great personalities.  Don't think you needed to do any data mining for those conclusions.

1 comment:

Erin Palette said...

And this is an excellent example of why I gave up on internet dating.