OkCupid Does The Math: “The Mathematics Of Beauty”

• Girls who are described as "cute" tend to be ignored by men.
• The more men as a group disagree about a woman's level of attractiveness, the more they end up liking her.
• Having some men think she is "ugly" can actually work in a woman's favor.

These are three of the surprising conclusions drawn from the latest OkTrend's study, "The Mathematics of Beauty." This time, the researchers at OkCupid focused on female attractiveness by looking beyond a woman's profile photo and "into the reaction she creates in the reptile mind of the human male." As always, the data used was gathered from the activity of actual OkCupid users, in this case 1.54 million votes, 596,000 messages, and 64,000 profiles.

It should come as no surprise that the hottest OkCupid members receive more page views and messages than less good-looking users, and it probably also isn't a surprise that men dedicate more time to the pursuit of attractiveness than women do. A beautiful woman on OkCupid receives approximately 4 times more messages than an average woman, and 25 times more messages than an unattractive woman. The OkCupid team examined a sample of 5,000 women, and sorted them based on attractiveness and the number of messages they received during the last month.

The graph, which can be found here in the original article, was adjusted to account for differences in factors like "race, location, age, profile completeness, login activity and so on," so that the only meaningful difference between the subjects plotted on the chart was their physical attractiveness. The graph revealed an extremely wide range of results, showing women with the same level of attractiveness receiving a vastly different number of messages per month.

Armed with the data, the OkCupid team set out to determine what caused the disparities they had found...and the key, it turns out, is in mathematics.

If we rate attractiveness using the classic 10-point scale, a woman who is rated a 7 could be a 7 because everyone who sees her considers her to be one. On the other hand, she could be a 7 because the majority of people consider her a 10, and a few think she is a 0. If all we know about a woman is that she's a 7, we don't know how that number was determined. Writer Christian Rudder uses actress Kristen Bell to illustrate the point: while she is certainly good-looking, she is not out-of-this-world, supermodel hot. Most people would probably rate her as "very attractive," while a smaller number of people will likely consider her "super hot" and few would say she is "unattractive." In the case of Megan Fox, however, many people are likely to rate her attractiveness as extremely high - higher than Kristen Bell's - but a significant number of people will also probably rate her attractiveness as low (lower than Kristen Bell's).

What happens when this theory is applied to real OkCupid users?

We'll find out next time.