{"id":63679,"date":"2014-09-10T09:00:55","date_gmt":"2014-09-10T14:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=63679"},"modified":"2014-09-25T01:59:56","modified_gmt":"2014-09-25T06:59:56","slug":"does-homogamy-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/09\/10\/does-homogamy-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Homogamy Matter? A Query by OKCupid"},"content":{"rendered":"

In general, married couples are homogamous. \u00a0That is, they are more likely than not to\u00a0match on a whole host of characteristics: age, income, education level, race, religion, immigration history, attractiveness level, and more.<\/p>\n

But,\u00a0does homogamy really translate into\u00a0compatibility? \u00a0Or, do we just think it does?<\/p>\n

OKCupid set about to find out. \u00a0This is the second of two posts about recent revelations that they, like Facebook, have been doing\u00a0experiments on users. The last one was a depressing look at the role of attractiveness<\/a> on the site. This one is about the impact of match ratings<\/a>. \u00a0Yep, they lied to see what would happen.<\/p>\n

OkCupid users answer a series of questions and\u00a0the site then offers a “match rating” between any two users. \u00a0The idea is that people with a higher match rating are more homogamous — by some measure not identical to those that sociologists typically use, to be clear — and, therefore, more likely to get along.<\/p>\n

The first thing they did was artificially alter the match rating for couples whose true match was only 30%. \u00a0Users could read the profile, look at the pictures, reviews answers to questions,\u00a0and see a match rating. \u00a0In other words, they had a lot of information and one summary statistic that\u00a0might be true or false.<\/p>\n

People were slightly more likely to send a message and continue a conversation \u00a0if they thought\u00a0they were a 60% match or better. \u00a0This is interesting since\u00a0all these couples were poorly matched and it shouldn’t have been too difficult to discover that this was so.<\/p>\n

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

Rudder’s interpretation of the data is that you can make two people like each other by just telling them that they should.<\/p>\n

Or maybe, he\u00a0considered, their algorithm was just terrible. So, they took couples who matched at the 30, 60, and 90% rating and displayed a random match rating that was wrong two-thirds of the time. \u00a0Then, they waited to see how many couples got to\u00a0exchanging four\u00a0messages (their measure of a “conversation”).<\/p>\n

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

The lower right corner suggests that the ideal situation is to be a good match and know it. \u00a0Likewise, if you’re a bad match and you know it things probably won’t\u00a0get very far. But the difference between actually<\/em> being a good match and just thinking<\/em> you are isn’t as big as we might think it would be. \u00a0At least, not in the space of four messages.<\/p>\n

So,\u00a0does\u00a0homogamy really\u00a0translate into\u00a0compatibility? \u00a0Or, do we just think it does? \u00a0Maybe a little of both.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/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 general, married couples are homogamous. \u00a0That is, they are more likely than not to\u00a0match on a whole host of characteristics: age, income, education level, race, religion, immigration history, attractiveness level, and more. But,\u00a0does homogamy really translate into\u00a0compatibility? \u00a0Or, do we just think it does? OKCupid set about to find out. \u00a0This is the second […]<\/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":[29,387,34,272,85,285,120,37,76],"class_list":["post-63679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-dating","tag-education","tag-marriagefamily","tag-politics","tag-raceethnicity","tag-sex","tag-social-psychology","tag-work"],"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\/63679","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=63679"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64212,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63679\/revisions\/64212"}],"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=63679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}