
For Online Daters, Women Peak at 18 While Men Peak at 50, Study Finds. - Raj7k
https://bigthink.com/stephen-johnson/study-women-peak-at-18-on-dating-apps-men-peak-at-50
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nanis
Some people never learn how self-selection into your convenience sample
affects results.

Also, here is the NY Times article on which this click-bait is based:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/style/dating-apps-
online-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/style/dating-apps-online-men-
women-age.html)

~~~
Raj7k
Changed the title. Don't know how to replace the link. Thanks for pointing
out.

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aluren
Link to the full paper (at _Science Advances_ no less):
[http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/4/8/eaap9815...](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/4/8/eaap9815.full.pdf)

Fascinating stuff, and there is so much more to the paper than what the title
suggests. Some highlights:

"The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in
New York, received 1504 messages during the period of observation, equivalent
to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month."

"The average woman’s desirability drops from the time she is 18 until she is
60. For men, desirability peaks around 50 and then declines. In keeping with
previous work, there is also a clear and consistent dependence on ethnicity,
with Asian women and white men being the most desirable potential mates by our
measures [...]"

"Desirability is associated with education most strongly for men, for whom
more education is always more desirable. For women, an undergraduate degree is
most desirable; postgraduate education is associated with decreased
desirability among women."

"[...] A majority of both sexes tend to contact partners who are more
desirable than themselves on average and hardly any users contact partners who
are significantly less desirable. The curves are remarkably consistent across
all four cities, with men and women on average sending messages to potential
partners who are 26 and 23% further up the rankings than themselves,
respectively."

"Both men and women tend to write substantially longer messages to more
desirable partners, up to twice as long in some cases. The effect is larger
for messages sent by women than by men, although there are exceptions. Among
the groups we study, for instance, it is men in Seattle who have the most
pronounced increase in message length. Of the cities studied, Seattle presents
the most unfavorable dating climate for men, with as many as two men for every
woman in some segments of the user population."

"[...] we see an interesting difference between women and men: the women show
an increase in their use of positive words when communicating with more
desirable partners, while the men show a decrease. The effect size is modest
but is consistent across all four cities and statistically significant. [...]
in all four cities, men experience slightly lower reply rates when they write
more positively worded messages. Although our analysis can not reveal the
underlying process that gives rise to these behaviors (for example,
reinforcement learning), this result may offer a hint about why men tend to
write somewhat less positive messages to more desirable partners."

