{"id":63669,"date":"2014-08-19T09:00:28","date_gmt":"2014-08-19T14:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=63669"},"modified":"2014-08-14T03:01:12","modified_gmt":"2014-08-14T08:01:12","slug":"okcupid-experiments-on-its-users-makes-us-hate-ourselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/08\/19\/okcupid-experiments-on-its-users-makes-us-hate-ourselves\/","title":{"rendered":"OKCupid Experiments on Its Users, Makes Us Hate Ourselves"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the aftermath of the revelation that Facebook has been manipulating our emotions \u2013 the one that prompted Jenny Davis to write a post titled\u00a0Newsflash: Facebook Has Always Been Manipulating Your Emotions<\/a> \u2013 the folks at OkCupid admitted that they been doing it, too.<\/p>\n

I’ll let you debate the ethics. Here’s what Christian Rudder and his team\u00a0found out about attractiveness<\/a>. Let me warn you, it’s not pretty.<\/p>\n

OkCupid originally gave users the opportunity to\u00a0rate each other twice: once for\u00a0personality and once\u00a0for score. \u00a0The two were strikingly correlated.<\/p>\n

\"5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Do\u00a0better looking people have\u00a0more fabulous personalities? \u00a0No. Here’s a hint:\u00a0a woman with a personality rating in the 99th percentile whose profile contained no text at all.<\/p>\n

\"6\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Perhaps\u00a0people were judging both\u00a0looks and personality by looks alone. \u00a0They ran a test. Some people got to see a user’s profile picture and the text and others just saw the picture. Their ratings correlated which means, as Rudder\u00a0put it: “Your picture\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth\u2026 almost nothing.”<\/p>\n

Their second\u00a0“experiment” involved\u00a0removing all of the pictures from the site for one full\u00a0workday. \u00a0In response, users said something to the effect of hell no<\/em>. \u00a0Here’s a graph showing the traffic on that day (in red) compared to a normal Tuesday (the dotted line):<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When they put the pictures back up, the conversations that had started petered out much more aggressively than usual. As Rudder put it:\u00a0\u00a0“It was like we\u2019d turned on the bright lights at the bar at midnight.” \u00a0This graph shows that conversations started during the blackout had a shorter life expectancy\u00a0than conversations normally did.<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s too bad the people are putting such an emphasis on looks, because other data that OkCupid collected suggests that they\u00a0aren’t as important as we think they are. \u00a0This figure shows the odds that a woman reported having\u00a0a good time with someone she was set up with blind. \u00a0The odds are pretty even whether she and the guy are\u00a0equally good looking, he’s much better looking, or she is. \u00a0Rudder says that the results for men are similar.<\/p>\n

\"3\"<\/a><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the aftermath of the revelation that Facebook has been manipulating our emotions \u2013 the one that prompted Jenny Davis to write a post titled\u00a0Newsflash: Facebook Has Always Been Manipulating Your Emotions \u2013 the folks at OkCupid admitted that they been doing it, too. I’ll let you debate the ethics. Here’s what Christian Rudder and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":63676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20057,387,272,37],"class_list":["post-63669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-attractiveness-bias","tag-dating","tag-marriagefamily","tag-social-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/08\/14.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63669"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63689,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63669\/revisions\/63689"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}