What would be interesting is the ratio of the two curves — that is, if I’m an ugly/average/attractive person, how many messages will I receive?

Interesting piece to read, but can’t say I agree with this particular sentence. That a woman ranked a man as “worse-looking than medium” doesn’t *necessarily* mean she thinks that he isn’t “good enough” for her. It merely means … hmm … that he’s worse-than-medium looking. It’s possible that some women can objectively assess a man’s looks relative to other men she’s seen/known, but still consider him desirable in other ways.

Same for the attractive women.

Same for the attractive and unattractive men.

Just to see.

1) the 5 point rating thing they mention is Quick Match, and users are asked to rate the match based on the first 4 pictures of their profile and some of the text blurbs they write. It’s not supposed to be “Hot or Not” The blurbs can be a reason for not ranking someone highly as well.

2) a rating of 4 or 5 on this scale causes a message to be sent to the person that they were ranked highly, showing them 9 profile pictures (1 is the person who ranked them, the other 8 are random) and then they are invited to start ranking people as well. If you rank the person who ranked you as a 4 or 5 a message is sent to both parties informing them of this, presumably as an ice breaker.

3) there’s a “Can’t Tell” button that effective functions as a no rating. I couldn’t tell from the article what they did with profiles in that data set that were ranked “can’t tell”

I personally never click a ranking less than 4 stars. I’ll click Can’t Tell instead. There’s no upside to me to be ranking a woman as unattractive/uninteresting.

I’ve several times gotten the message that someone has ranked me as a 4 or 5. The names of the profiles behind the random additional pictures are available in the source of the email. You can open the quick match side by side with these pictures and pick out in the first 3-5 profiles which was the one who selected you. To date, I’ve only found 1 or 2 of those people interesting enough to select back.

I agree it’s interesting information, but I don’t think it’s necessarily being analyzed correctly.

This is bad logic. Just because we deem their photos unattractive doesn’t mean we won’t date them or message them. I just means we don’t like their photo.

And frankly, the guys who appear “attractive” on photos are often NOT in real life, and the ones who are “unattractive” in photos often are in real life. An attractive photograph does not an attractive person make.

(I met my bf on Lava, and his picture was not an “attractive” one, but looking at it, I thought “He looks like a jerk, but he looks he’d be fun”. I wasn’t wrong.)

It makes me wonder who is providing the ratings and in which context: are the more attractive women (those receiving the highest volume of messages), as a part of the message transaction, also providing rating information on the attractiveness of the senders? If so you have a disproportionate distribution in that the more attractive women will be providing more of the ratings, and will also be experiencing a higher influx of messages and will therefore be less likely to feel any social consequences from providing that rating. Additionally, they may be annoyed at receiving many “ur hawt” message and thus further dissociated from a probable positive rating (as previously discussed on BoingBoing from OKCupid: http://boingboing.net/2009/10/06/charts-to-help-you-s.html).

Do they offer raw data?

I’d say this is a little misleading. The graph is listing the total percentage of men and messages sent. There are a lot fewer men that are above average, so there will be correspondingly fewer messages sent to those men simply because they’re harder to find. To state that this means that women are more likely to send messages to less-than-average-looking men suggests that women, given a choice between attractive and below-average, are more likely to message the below-average man, which isn’t what the data shows.

It does, however, show that women aren’t far more likely to message attractive men–they’re just somewhat more likely to do so.

Another interesting perspective to bear in mind is that women don’t necessarily rate the *same* men as attractive/unattractive, whereas men tend to rate the same women the same way, overall. So the data more likely suggests that women have specific tastes in men and prefer men who match those tastes, but that their tastes vary significantly so that many men would be considered overall below average but above average by a significant number of women.

The difference between men and women is where “looks” are on their list.

If the medium to most attractive section of the male population recieved proportionally more messages than another section of the population it follows that they’ve been sent proportionally more messages.

It doesn’t follow that most of the messages sent were sent to them.

Women “are much more likely to send messages to men who are slightly less-than-average looking.” is correct, for this graph, because the majority of them did.

In other words, all of the men still had an equally likely chance of being messaged. This isn’t exactly the case here since the messaging distribution is shifted slightly to the right compared to the attractiveness distribution.

Women pursue men who can fulfill their needs — attractiveness falls below economic or sexual or emotional fulfillment. If you have all three of these, your face or body are (all but) irrelevant.

Women want relationships including marriage or potentially fatherhood, your commitment level being the primary entry point.

Pursue what you want, and be honest about it — the response will reflect, and you will never feel backed into a corner. If all you want is sex, you may not get it, but at least you won’t be ambushed.

I know what you’re saying, and I like looking at women as much as the next guy likes looking at women.

But not as much as I like touching and tasting women. Visual stimulus is an appetizer. Touch and taste make up the main course.

Interesting results, in any case.

The way that looks ratings work on that site is that you rate the other person a 4 or higher (on a scale of 5), AND the other person does the same to you, it notifies both of you.

And I think it’s that knowledge of notification that skews the data.

I rate almost anyone I’d put my penis in as a 4. Which I guess makes me a bigger slut, and a bit more sad than the average man on the site. (Data is data, man. It’s not personal.)

But my guess is that women on OKCupid, knowing that a 4 leads to a notification, rate men lower unless they’re really sure they do want said penises put into them. No point in inciting the desperate bro-bags like myself. (I just threw up in my mouth a little, coining the term bro-bag. Sorry about that y’all.) So they only rate someone as a 4 or higher, if they are more than a little certain that with a couple of drinks (or prayer, if you’re into the weird shit) that they want to get busy with them.

My evidence… It’s scant and circumstantial at best. But I do know this. I tend to get higher ratings and more open flirtations with people who live outside of 300 miles or so. Less danger. Or sample error. Fair enough.

And for the record. I’m not ugly. My profile is funny and clever. Or so I’ve been told. Check out twenty3skidoo on OKCupid, and tell me what you’d rate me. Because I just may be a gross married uggo talking out of his ass.

So, as you can see, I, as a female, take into consideration more than just looks when rating guys, with the addition of other factors such as my mood, perception of personality, motive, current barometric pressure, etc..

All that said, twenty3skidoo is adorable. :3