That plus I’d expect a certain amount of sampling bias at HotOrNot. I mean, I could be wrong, but AFAIK it could easily be true that you are in the 43% bracket of HotOrNot (not that I expect their 10-point system actually correlates to this, but anyway...) while still being pretty attractive by real-world mortal human standards.
People’s subjective experience of how attractive someone is is heavily influenced by framing. I can’t find the relevant study but basically people responded with better ratings when someone was surrounded by less attractive people than when someone was surrounded by people who were around the same or more attractive. Conclusion? The same as Mises: preference rankings are ordinal, not cardinal. The frame of hotornot is looking at a very large group, so all but the most attractive in the set will rank slightly worse than they otherwise would have (real life situations are always much smaller sets).
In addition, as the okcupid article indicates, variance matters a lot. 3 people rating you a 9 or 10 and 7 people rating you 1 or 2 means your overall rating will be low, even though a significant fraction of people think you’re the bees knees.
Oh and to quantify: the research I’m familiar with indicates that women should, on average, bump up their estimation of their own attractiveness and men should bump it downward (but a smaller bump than women). But this hides an important dynamic: we don’t care what the average person thinks of us. We care about what people whom we find attractive think. A rating of 8 from someone who we rate an 8 is roughly twelve billion times more important than from someone we rate a 2.
Addtionally, assessments of physical attractiveness are also influenced by assessments of other traits. Suppose you meet someone you think is a 10, but you discover that you cringe every time they open their mouth (to disambiguate, this a reference to the content of their speech, not their dentistry). Not only are you probably not going to want to be with that person, but your physical assessment is going to change. I don’t mean they will suddenly seem ugly, but probably they’ll be a 7 or 8, and you won’t be able to understand how you ever thought they were a 10 in the first place.
Another rating bias: people probably don’t use the rating scale uniformly.
I remember reading somewhere that when women rate men online, instead of “nice, medium, ugly” their rating is more like “nice, ugly, ugly” (the median guy is rated disproportionally low).
If this is true, then this bias could be partially corrected if the web would not display “your rating is 4.3 of 10”, but rather “your rating is higher than 70% of people in the same category”. Or if the site displays global statistics, you can locate yourself in the distribution curve.
You can find that on okCupid’s post about attractiveness. Women rate 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium, whereas male ratings are symmetric and fairly normalized.
That plus I’d expect a certain amount of sampling bias at HotOrNot. I mean, I could be wrong, but AFAIK it could easily be true that you are in the 43% bracket of HotOrNot (not that I expect their 10-point system actually correlates to this, but anyway...) while still being pretty attractive by real-world mortal human standards.
People’s subjective experience of how attractive someone is is heavily influenced by framing. I can’t find the relevant study but basically people responded with better ratings when someone was surrounded by less attractive people than when someone was surrounded by people who were around the same or more attractive. Conclusion? The same as Mises: preference rankings are ordinal, not cardinal. The frame of hotornot is looking at a very large group, so all but the most attractive in the set will rank slightly worse than they otherwise would have (real life situations are always much smaller sets).
In addition, as the okcupid article indicates, variance matters a lot. 3 people rating you a 9 or 10 and 7 people rating you 1 or 2 means your overall rating will be low, even though a significant fraction of people think you’re the bees knees.
Oh and to quantify: the research I’m familiar with indicates that women should, on average, bump up their estimation of their own attractiveness and men should bump it downward (but a smaller bump than women). But this hides an important dynamic: we don’t care what the average person thinks of us. We care about what people whom we find attractive think. A rating of 8 from someone who we rate an 8 is roughly twelve billion times more important than from someone we rate a 2.
Addtionally, assessments of physical attractiveness are also influenced by assessments of other traits. Suppose you meet someone you think is a 10, but you discover that you cringe every time they open their mouth (to disambiguate, this a reference to the content of their speech, not their dentistry). Not only are you probably not going to want to be with that person, but your physical assessment is going to change. I don’t mean they will suddenly seem ugly, but probably they’ll be a 7 or 8, and you won’t be able to understand how you ever thought they were a 10 in the first place.
Another rating bias: people probably don’t use the rating scale uniformly.
I remember reading somewhere that when women rate men online, instead of “nice, medium, ugly” their rating is more like “nice, ugly, ugly” (the median guy is rated disproportionally low).
If this is true, then this bias could be partially corrected if the web would not display “your rating is 4.3 of 10”, but rather “your rating is higher than 70% of people in the same category”. Or if the site displays global statistics, you can locate yourself in the distribution curve.
You can find that on okCupid’s post about attractiveness. Women rate 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium, whereas male ratings are symmetric and fairly normalized.