- Women rate 80% of males as less than average looking. The graph is completely off-kilter from what you might expect (a pretty usual normal distribution around 50%-attractive)
- The reply rate between sender/receiver attractive is also a really interesting social phenomenon. The unattractive recipient who gets a message from a very attractive member of the opposite sex is unlikely to respond. Self-esteem at work!
I love this sort of statistical drivel (I mean that in the absolute nicest way), it certainly beats reading pop-psych books.
This could be partly due to the fact that especially good-looking men can find a mate easily, so they never get around to registering on a dating site. To the folks on HN it's probably a normal thing, but I believe dating sites still have a certain 'for losers' stigma in other social circles.
And on the other side, perhaps girls that are very picky cannot find a guy to their liking so they end up on dating sites in greater numbers than the average.
To put it another way, what's the probability of a girl finding a quality guy at a bar versus finding a guy who just wants to take her to bed? I know a lot of girls who are sick of that game.
As a result, you get a lot of guys who aren't attractive enough to pick up random chicks at bars and you get a lot of women who are sick of being picked up by the types of guys that make a sport out of picking up random chicks at bars. Those types of girls tend to be attractive. That's not to say that everyone in online dating services falls into one of these two buckets, but that is why you see such weird skews in the data.
It doesn't completely surprise me; it's always been my impression that the average female is more attractive to the average male than vice versa. Although I wouldn't have expected the difference to be so large.
The unattractive recipient who gets a message from a very attractive member of the opposite sex is unlikely to respond. Self-esteem at work!
And the effect is much stronger for males writing to females. I can believe that; an ugly guy who gets an email from a hot girl may suspect it's a setup, but is probably more willing to take the chance.
Average looking != average attractive. If asking a woman about how attractive a man is based only on a photo you will get results like that because you've withheld most of the information she'd use to judge his attractiveness in person.
This is very interesting. It's always been almost impossible to get my gf to point out other guys she finds attractive - this might point towards a reason, although it still doesn't really provide an explanation.
"I love that both the males and females are completely delusional but on opposite ends of the spectrum."
Asking people to rate who's below average looking will generally result in the vast majority of people being rated as such. Yeah, statistically you'd expect around 50%, but once you throw human emotion into the mix all bets are off.
Am I missing something?
The graph is somewhat misleading in its portrayal, but I think if it did indicate your suspicions, the author would've surely said something about it.
For instance:
"So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten."
(And it's doubly confusing because patio11 refers to it as an "old wive's tale".)
Approaching extra-beautiful women in person, on the other hand, can be intimidating.
That said, woman A and woman B are both probably approached by more men than a majority of other women, but their relative success is non-intuitive.
http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/your_looks_and_inbox/Message-Mult...
This shows that the most attractive people get more messages than those less attractive, uniformly. It does not provide evidence for the existence of "A and B such that beauty(A) > beauty(B) AND suitors(A) < suitors(B)".
I think you're confused by the distribution graph:
http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/your_looks_and_inbox/Male-Messagi...
But the "dip" on the right doesn't mean what you seem to think it does. If there were no dip, and the message distribution line had a uniformly positive slope, it would mean that the majority of all messages would be going to the most attractive women. The existence of the dip simply means that the sheer number of women with average attractiveness get enough messages to outweigh the tiny percentage who are most attractive in total number of messages.
My last sentence was about physical meetings; the rest of my comments were with respect to online messaging on dating sites like okcupid. In other words, I was suggesting that the old wives' tale may have more truth with respect to face to face than online.
Much of it conforms to the old wives tales or intuitions of people, but "The women who are subjectively rated the most attractive get disproportionately less attention from men. No, really, we're not making it up, we can demonstrate this with SQL" is a whole lot more fascinating than the equivalent finding justified by, ahem, wild speculation. (Or its close cousin, "We surveyed 18 men and 22 women who happened to be enrolled in psych 101 at this campus! Sweet, sweet empiricism!")