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Women are inclined to regret the sex they had, and men the sex they didn’t.”
But it’s a big problem, especially when you’re researching belief and behavior. It even has a name. It’s called WEIRD research: white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. And most published social research papers are WEIRD.
I imagine everyday people will always be more or less nameless, as indeed they are even here. The best data can’t change that. But we all will be counted.
longitudinal data—data from following the same people, over time—and I was speculating about the research of the future.
In a mathematical sense, a man’s age and his sexual aims are independent variables: the former changes while the latter never does. I call this Wooderson’s law, in honor of its most famous proponent, Matthew McConaughey’s character from Dazed and Confused.
Unlike Wooderson himself, what men claim they want is quite different from the private voting data we’ve just seen. The ratings above were submitted without any specific prompt beyond “Judge this person.” But when you ask men outright to select the ages of women they’re looking for, you get much different results.
The next plot (the final one of this type we’ll look at) identifies the age with the greatest density of contact attempts. These most-messaged ages are described by the darkest gray squares drifting along the left-hand edge of the larger swath. Those three dark verticals in the graph’s lower half show the jumps in a man’s self-concept as he approaches middle age. You can almost see the gears turning. At forty-four, he’s comfortable approaching a woman as young as thirty-five. Then, one year later … he thinks better of it. While a nine-year age difference is fine, ten years is apparently too
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If you could do the same thing for a typical woman at twenty, you’d get a different story. Over the years, she, too, would lose men from her pool to things like marriage, but she would also lose options to time itself—as the years passed, fewer and fewer of the remaining single men would find her attractive. Her dating pool is like a can with two holes—it drains on the double.
Her peers (guys in their early twenties) form the biggest component, and the numbers slope off rapidly—thirty-year-old men, for example, make up only a small part. They are less likely to actually contact someone so young, despite their privately expressed interest, and in addition many men have already partnered off by that age. By the time the woman is fifty, this is who’s left (and still interested), presented on the same scale. It’s Bridget Jones in charts.
In any group of women who are all equally good-looking, the number of messages they get is highly correlated to the variance: from the pageant queens to the most homely women to the people right in between, the individuals who get the most affection will be the polarizing ones. And the effect isn’t small—being highly polarizing will in fact get you about 70 percent more messages.
Part of that is because variance means, by definition, that more people like you a lot (as well as dislike you a lot). And those enthusiastic guys—let’s just call them the fanboys—are the ones who do most of the messaging. So by pushing people toward the high end (the 5s), you get more action.
Looking at the phenomenon from the opposite angle—the low-variance side—a relatively attractive woman with consistent scores is someone any guy would consider conventionally pretty. And she therefore might seem to be more popular than she really is. Broad appeal gives the impression that other guys are after her, too, and that makes her incrementally less appealing. Our interested but on-the-fence guy moves on.
“pratfall effect”—as long as you’re generally competent, making a small, occasional mistake makes people think you’re more competent. Flaws call out the good stuff all the more. This need for imperfection might just be how our brains are put together. Our sense of smell, which is the most connected to the brain’s emotional center, prefers discord to unison. Scientists have shown this in labs, by mixing foul odors with pleasant ones, but nature, in the wisdom of evolutionary time, realized it long before. The pleasant scent given off by many flowers, like orange blossoms and jasmine, contains a
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Only 0.2 percent of the messages on the site are sent by users to a person to whom they awarded fewer than 3 stars.
Nostalgia used to be called mal du Suisse—the Swiss sickness.
the typical word length in Hamlet (3.99) and in a collection of Wodehouse’s stories (4.05) and found them both less than the length in his Twitter sample (4.80).
The data shows that with each passing year, we’re getting more wrapped up in the present. For example, written mentions of the year 1850 peaked (in 1851) at roughly 35 instances for every million words written. Mentions of the year 1900 peaked at 58 per million. Mentions of recent years peak at roughly three times that.
The average message is now just over 100 characters—Twitter-sized, in fact. And in terms of effect, it seems readers have adapted. The best messages, the ones that get the highest response rate, are now only 40 to 60 characters long.
I found it took the sender 73 minutes and 41 seconds to hammer out those 5,979 characters of hello—his final message was about as long as four pages in this book. He did not get a reply. Neither did the gentleman sender of B, who wins the Raymond Carver award for labor-intensive brevity. He took 387 keystrokes to get to “Hey.”
We can clarify the graph by making each dot 90 percent transparent. This lets you see the real density underneath.
Euler’s insight was that because you’re only supposed to cross each bridge once, to enter a new neighborhood you need a pair of bridges—one to get you in, another to get you out.
Research using a variety of sources (e-mail, IM, telephone) has shown that the more mutual friends two people share, the stronger their relationship.
Early on, the best predictor of a relationship doesn’t depend on the couple’s social graph at all; for the first year or so of dating, the optimal method is how often they view each other’s profile. Only over time, as the page views go down and their mutual network fills out, does assimilation come to dominate the calculus.
“I don’t like the dinosaur in this graphic. It looks too fake. Use a real photo of a dinosaur instead.”
There’s historically been no open channel between Ford and the folks who want the cup holders to be green or who think it would be better if the steering wheel were a square, because, you know, most turns are 90 degrees. That’s why traditional companies spend so much on market research—they
one of Google’s best designers, the person who in fact built their visual design team, Douglas Bowman, eventually quit because the process had become too microscopic. For one button, the company couldn’t decide between two shades of blue, so they launched all forty-one shades in between to see which performed better.
people appear to be heavily preselecting online for something that, once they sit down in person, doesn’t seem important to them.
Despite all this control, in the political case, the system breaks down. When you look beyond the labels, at who actually messages whom, and who replies (and therefore who ends up going on actual dates), it’s caring about politics, one way or the other, that is actually more important to mutual compatibility than the details of any particular belief.
Do you like scary movies? and Have you ever traveled alone to another country? have amazing predictive power.1 If you’re ever stumped
Some of the upshot was predictable. People sent messages without the typical biases, or racial and attractiveness skews. What a user couldn’t see, he couldn’t judge. But of the 30,333 messages sent blindly, eventually 8,912 got replies, a rate about 40 percent higher than usual.
People make choices from the information we provide because they can, not because they necessarily should.
Judging by just this compatibility measure, the four largest racial groups on OkCupid—Asian, black, Latino, and white—all get along about the same.1 In fact, race has less effect on match percentage than religion, politics, or education. Among the details that users believe are important, the closest comparison to race is Zodiac sign, which has no effect at all.
And an unintentionally hilarious 84 percent of users answer this match question … Would you consider dating someone who has vocalized a strong negative bias toward a certain race of people? in the absolute negative (choosing “No” over “Yes” and “It Depends”). In light of the previous data, that means 84 percent of people on OkCupid would not consider dating someone on OkCupid.
These matrices show two negative trends, and two positive. Blacks are again unappreciated by non-black users, but Asian men have joined them in the deep red. On the positive side, women clearly prefer men of their own race—they’re more “race-loyal” than men—but they also express a preference for white men.
We also have men who check both “Asian” and “white.” Comparing the two groups gives us some sense of what adding “whiteness” gets a person. It turns out: quite a bit. When you add white, ratings go up, across the board.
But if there is love at first sight, there is dislike at first sight too, right?
One paper asked: “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?” and got a resounding “Yes” from our nation’s HR professionals. The scientists sent identical résumés, some with “black-sounding” names at the top and some with “white-sounding” ones, and found that the latter received 50 percent more responses, no matter the position or industry.
Sociology professor Osagie K. Obasogie recently produced some ingenious research—he interviewed people blind from birth and found the same attitudes about race as in the sighted world. His sample was relatively small—just 106 individuals, but he found my OkCupid data in the flesh. He cites numerous examples of a young blind person being happy on a date until some “tell”—usually the feel of the hair but occasionally a whisper from a stranger—revealed that the other person was black. The date was then over.
OkCupid recently made a change for some photo displays, going from the size of the black box to that of the red, below: The designers just wanted the page to look more modern. What they didn’t anticipate (and later had to mitigate) was the following: all those extra pixels allowed the pretty faces to outshine the others all the more. The rich got richer. It was the web-design equivalent of American domestic policy.
This tendency is called social desirability bias, and it’s well documented: the world over, respondents answer questions in ways that make them look good. The most famous case was the so-called Bradley effect: in 1982, California voters told exit pollsters they had elected a black governor, Tom Bradley, by a significant margin, but in the privacy of the ballot box they had actually given his white opponent a narrow victory.
27.5 percent of Twitter’s 500 million tweets a day are retweets, people just passing along someone else’s thought.
Facebook’s data team investigated their version of the phenomenon, tracing the evolution of a single status update from the health-care debates in 2009 through the network: No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, post this as your status for the rest of the day. This was reposted, verbatim, more than 470,000 times and also spawned 121,605 different variants, which themselves received about 800,000 more posts. Someone who didn’t quite feel that the update spoke for him would change it slightly, and versions spread
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This counterintuitive relationship between the popularity of a word (its rank in a given vocabulary) and the number of times it appears is described by something called Zipf’s law, an observed statistical property of language that, like so much of the best math, lies somewhere between miracle and coincidence.1 It states that in any large body of text, a word’s popularity (its place in the lexicon, with 1 being the highest ranking) multiplied by the number of times it shows up, is the same for every word in the text. Or, very elegantly:
Phish might’ve already given it away, but inside the white man rages a music festival for lumberjacks.
These are users speaking in their own voice, and I’m going to let them do just that, but I will point out a few broad trends: white people differentiate themselves mostly by their hair and eyes, Asians by their country of origin, Latinos by their music.
If men from such different environments as Mississippi and Massachusetts are looking for gay porn at equal rates, that’s strong evidence that supposed external forces have little effect on same-sex attraction.
In the United States, of all Google searches that begin “Is my husband …,” the most common word to follow is “gay.” “Gay” is 10 percent more common in such searches than the second-place word, “cheating.” It is 8 times more common than “an alcoholic” and 10 times more common than “depressed.”
Funnily enough, in sex, as in wealth and language, we have an inequality problem. According to this data, the top 2 percent of gay men are having about 28 percent of the total gay sex.
The United States and the USSR split Korea on the 38th parallel because that line stood out on a map in an officer’s National Geographic.
For websites, political and natural borders are just another set of data points to consider.
