OKC is a dating website, and some people are only looking for casual sex, so it does not surprise me that looks are more important than text, nor is this a bad thing. After all, whatever you write is going to attract some people and repel others, which largely cancels out, while beauty is more objective and will attract/repel everyone to a highly correlated degree. If you compared individual ratings rather than collapsing across all visitors (which seems to be what they did) than words would have a far greater effect.
Also, people looking for sex will (I imagine) rate many profiles and play a numbers game, whereas those looking for love spend far more time on individual messages. In the time it takes to asses one persons personality you can judge dozens of peoples looks. This means that there is a sampling bias in ratings, weighted towards people who judge based on looks.
It is true that members of subcultures, such as goth girls, will have a far higher variance in perceived attractiveness. However, this is a fairly small percentage of the population. Furthermore, aspects such as facial symmetry are universally perceived as attractive, so even if you don’t like goth girls you can probably judge if one is more attractive than another.
It is true that members of subcultures, such as goth girls, will have a far higher variance in perceived attractiveness. However, this is a fairly small percentage of the population.
Most of the example in the OKCupid article weren’t Goth girls. One was a girl who put a flower into her hair.
The next girl has a round face.
More generally there are guys who find a 1,80 meter tall girl more attractive than one that’s 1,60 as nowadays models are usually very tall and set the ideal of beauty for some people. Other guys prefer smaller woman.
A lot of my own cultural conditioning doesn’t come from watching TV but from dancing Salsa. As a result I think I will judge muscle tonus as more important than the average guy.
Different guys also care differently about factors such as weight or skin color.
The issue isn’t whether looks are objective (clearly they aren’t,) but whether judgments of looks are more correlated among the userbase than those of personality.
(Actually, the degree to which personality is correlated is probably the more interesting question here (granting that interestingness isn’t particularly objective either.) Robin Hanson has pointed to some studies that suggest that “compatibility” isn’t really a thing and some people are just easier to get along with than others—the study in question IIRC didn’t take selection effects into account, but it remains an interesting hypothesis.)
OKC is a dating website, and some people are only looking for casual sex, so it does not surprise me that looks are more important than text, nor is this a bad thing. After all, whatever you write is going to attract some people and repel others, which largely cancels out, while beauty is more objective and will attract/repel everyone to a highly correlated degree. If you compared individual ratings rather than collapsing across all visitors (which seems to be what they did) than words would have a far greater effect.
Also, people looking for sex will (I imagine) rate many profiles and play a numbers game, whereas those looking for love spend far more time on individual messages. In the time it takes to asses one persons personality you can judge dozens of peoples looks. This means that there is a sampling bias in ratings, weighted towards people who judge based on looks.
Ahem. (See also: this, search for “mean and variance”.)
It is true that members of subcultures, such as goth girls, will have a far higher variance in perceived attractiveness. However, this is a fairly small percentage of the population. Furthermore, aspects such as facial symmetry are universally perceived as attractive, so even if you don’t like goth girls you can probably judge if one is more attractive than another.
Most of the example in the OKCupid article weren’t Goth girls. One was a girl who put a flower into her hair. The next girl has a round face.
More generally there are guys who find a 1,80 meter tall girl more attractive than one that’s 1,60 as nowadays models are usually very tall and set the ideal of beauty for some people. Other guys prefer smaller woman.
A lot of my own cultural conditioning doesn’t come from watching TV but from dancing Salsa. As a result I think I will judge muscle tonus as more important than the average guy.
Different guys also care differently about factors such as weight or skin color.
The issue isn’t whether looks are objective (clearly they aren’t,) but whether judgments of looks are more correlated among the userbase than those of personality.
(Actually, the degree to which personality is correlated is probably the more interesting question here (granting that interestingness isn’t particularly objective either.) Robin Hanson has pointed to some studies that suggest that “compatibility” isn’t really a thing and some people are just easier to get along with than others—the study in question IIRC didn’t take selection effects into account, but it remains an interesting hypothesis.)