Contributed by: ElyseRomano on Friday, January 28 2011 @ 10:04 am
Last modified on Wednesday, May 24 2023 @ 11:31 am
Kristen Bell is universally thought of as good-looking.
Megan Fox is frequently considered super hot, but is also regarded as unattractive by many.
And how do regular OkCupid users stack up against such famous competition?
To explore how mathematics can determine a man's reaction to a woman's appearance, the OkCupid research team found users willing to submit their photographs to scrutiny under the site's 5 star rating system. Woman A had an attractiveness rating of 3.4/5 stars, and the number of messages she receives per month is 0.8 times the site's average. Woman B had an attractiveness rating of 3.3, and the number of messages she receives per month is 2.3 times the site's average. Though their star rating is very similar, the number of responses these women receive is very different. The pattern of votes that determined their attractiveness rating is also very different: for Woman A, there was a clear consensus, while for Woman B, there was a split decision. In simple terms:
The research team paired up more women of similar attractiveness ratings, and found that this pattern occurred again and again: "The less-messaged woman was usually considered consistently attractive, while the more-messaged woman often created variation in male opinion." To examine the pattern further, the researchers - and self-proclaimed math nerds - then compared the standard deviation of a woman's votes to the messages she receives from admirers. They found that "the more men disagree about a woman's looks, the more they like her." The women who had a higher volume of messages from men were also the women who received less consistent attractiveness ratings.
Then, as the team decided to analyze a woman's vote pattern of 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, and 5s, the math got more complicated. The equation can be found here, but in more easily understandable language, the formula predicts the amount of attention a woman will get, based on the curve of her votes, allowing researchers to "translate what guys think of a woman's looks into how much attention she actually gets." The Ms in the equation represent the men voting on a woman's looks. The Ms that are preceded by positive numbers contribute to messaging, and the Ms preceded by negative numbers subtract from it. From the formula, researchers found that:
In Christian Rudder's words, these findings mean that "If someone doesn't think you're hot, the next best thing for them to think is that you're ugly."
Huh? Could that really be true? For an explanation of what the OkCupid team thinks is actually going on, and a few thoughts on what it could mean for you, continue on to Part III!
To find out more about this dating site, read our review of OKCupid.com.