Online Dating

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:

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This free guided communication event will be eHarmony's 33rd with the last one occurring at the end of December (see Story).

Update #1: eHarmony.co.uk is also having a free communication event. It ends on February 15th, 2011.

For more information on this online matchmaking service, you can read our eHarmony review.

• 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.

In a previous post, we talked about the stir author Lori Gottlieb caused with the publication of her now-infamous book Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough, in which she theorizes that women have difficulty finding suitable partners because their expectations are too high, not because suitable partners do not exist. Women, she argues, have taken the feminist ideal to an extreme, and are setting potential partners up for failure by becoming so picky and entitled that they are holding men to standards that cannot possibly be reached.

Some of you probably identified with her hypothesis immediately, and began reevaluating your expectations of partners and approach to finding a mate. Others probably reacted with anger and resentment, infuriated by Gottlieb's attitude towards feminism. And some of you are probably just confused, unsure of which side of the argument to support.

It's a debate that will likely never be settled, but more evidence has been found that suggests that Gottlieb might not be as crazy as she seems. In a BigThink.com article called "If I'm Hot, Then Why Are You Not?" Marina Adshade discusses her theory that people are poor judges of their position on the dating market. Many online dating profiles, she writes, include the line "I'm not willing to settle, and neither should you," which "suggests that people have estimated the quality of mate that they should be able to attract and are unwilling to 'settle' for anything less." More often than not, however, we are strongly biased when it comes to our assessment of ourselves. Most people overestimate their assets, like physical attractiveness, and underestimate their negative traits.

In one study, called "What Makes You Click? Mate Preferences and Matching Outcomes in Online Dating" by G. Hitsch, A. Hortaçsu, and D. Ariely, members of dating sites were asked to rate their appearance. Less than 1% of participants rated themselves as "below average," and only 29% of men and 26% of women believed that they look "like anyone else walking down the street." That means that a whopping 68% of men and 72% of women considered their attractiveness "above average." And this biased self-assessment is not confined to physical appearance - people consistently rate themselves as funnier, kinder, more intelligent, etc., than the average person, an outlook that has contributed strongly to the pervasive attitude that Gottlieb claims is preventing many women from finding partners: "Why should I settle for someone average, when I have so many great things going for me?"

Another study, conducted using data from HotOrNot.com, seems to further confirm that people almost always overestimate their place in the dating market. The behavior of 16,550 HotOrNot.com members was examined; each subject "viewed an average of 144 pictures over the ten-day period and each of the 2,386,267 observations in the data set [was] an individual decision to hit the 'Meet Me' link." Each individual's rating of attractiveness and the attractiveness of the people he or she was interested in meeting were determined by other members of the site.

Some of the results were not surprising:

• The higher the hotness rating of a member's photo, the more likely other members were to want to meet them.
• A one point increase on the rating scale (for instance, from a 7 to an 8) coincided with a 130% increase in the likelihood that a member viewing the photo would initiate contact.
• Male members were 240% more likely to click on the "Meet Me" link than female members.
• Male members were also more influenced by the attractiveness rating than females were, and were more likely to initiate contact with women who were more attractive than themselves than women were with more attractive men.

Other results supported Gottlieb and Adshade's theories...but you'll have to tune in next time to hear about the other conclusions drawn from the study, and learn more about how your own dating life might be affected!

According to BigThink.com writer Marina Adshade, the answer is YES.

In an article called "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating", OkCupid's dating research blog, OkTrends, reported in April of this year that the practice of paying for dates on other dating sites is fundamentally broken. Their main argument is that there are too few subscribers on paid dating sites, and therefore too few potential matches for each single-and-searching member. It's a point that might be valid, but there is also a counter-argument: "that if you do find a match on an online dating site, that match is more likely to commit to meet if they have paid a fee for the service."

A 2009 study published in Current Psychology called "Sunk Cost and Commitment to Dates Arranged Online" tested this theory by creating an online dating simulation in which participants "paid" a fee in order to search online for potential dates after answering a questionnaire describing their ideal match. After the search, participants were told that a match was found, but that he or she didn't have all of the qualities the participant was looking for. They were also told that a friend was interested in setting them up on a blind date with a person who was a perfect match for them. Each participant was told to choose how much time, out of an hour total, they would be willing to commit to the inferior match from the dating site, and how much time they would commit to the superior match of the blind date.

The results of the study backed up Adshade's theory. A strong correlation was observed between a participant's preference for the match from the online dating site and the amount of money they had invested in the service. Participants who paid little or no money for the match making service were significantly less likely to choose the online date over the blind date than participants who paid a higher fee. On average, the length of time women in the study choose to dedicate to a date was 13 minutes when the cost was $0, and 28 minutes when the cost was $50. Men who paid $0 were willing to commit 28 minutes to a date, while men who paid $50 were willing to commit 49 minutes.

Adshade draws two important conclusions from this research:

1. If money is used to encourage commitment, men need much less of an incentive to commit than women do.
2. Sunk cost effects tend to disappear over time, which means that if you're searching for a partner online it is advantageous to use a site that charges a monthly fee, rather than a one-time upfront fee.

So what do you think, daters? Are you more likely to find your match using a free dating site or a paid online dating service?

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Read our review of eHarmony for more information about this online matchmaking service.