
The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures - smokinn
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/01/20/the-4-big-myths-of-profile-pictures/
======
nhebb
If you're single, you could reverse engineer this to have a higher chance of
getting a date. Look for attractive girls who have pictures with all the
attributes that get poor responses, and it should lead to less competition and
better odds for you.

~~~
pohl
Maybe I read too much Roissy, but my first reaction to this idea was that
competition-avoidance is more of a beta trait than an alpha one, so while your
suggestion may be useful, it might be a good idea to bring some game along
anyway. But if you had game to bring, then why would you have to pick off
stragglers around the herd's periphery in the first place?

~~~
lionhearted
Increased competition =/= increased quality. Increased quality = increased
quality.

I had a life changing experience at age 22. A manic crazy group of Peruvian
girls brought me home from a nightclub to their party. Okay, we had a nice
night, but in the morning - seeing the girls without their hair, makeup,
looking hungover - it's like, wow, highly sexualized doesn't mean beautiful.
It just means highly sexualized, which comes from a lot of work on her part.
But as you saw in the Okcupid article, highly sexualized draws men's attention
- "flirty face", the Myspace pose, etc.

But getting one of those flirty, sexualized girls doesn't mean higher quality!
It just means you got a girl who put work into appearing highly sexualized,
which if anything, is the sign of maybe a fun fling but not a quality
girlfriend.

Me, I stopped looking for that, and started looking more for just decent
quality skin, a walk with some energy in it, awareness in her eyes, and so on.
You can always teach a girl how to dress and make herself up to your tastes,
which I did for my last serious girlfriend who was getting her PhD in physics.
Too much jeans and sneakers when I met her, lots of skirts and dresses and
leather boots and heels when I moved out of the USA.

But I like a lot of other things that most men don't - I prefer taller women,
and I prefer women who are built strong with good musculature, athletes, and
girls with wider hips and shoulders. It always amazes me when I meet a girl
who is an athlete and she's getting so much less attention from men than a
girl who is on the alcohol + cigarettes + no food diet.

But I digress, quality is quality, and if you can find quality with less
competition, that's absolutely worth going and getting. Going for a girl who
is equal or lower quality but more highly chased doesn't make your life
better, it's headache for (at best) ego-gratification, at worst a waste of
time.

~~~
foldr
>You can always teach a girl how to dress and make herself up to your tastes,

Well, you know, just as long as she doesn't have a mind of her own.

I honestly find discussion about dating on HN a bit disturbing. I mean, would
you be comfortable with a girl that you wanted to date reading this post?
Speculating on her "quality" as if she was a horse.

~~~
lionhearted
> Well, you know, just as long as she doesn't have a mind of her own.

You read into it too much mate - girlfriends have dressed me to their taste
too, encouraging more casual, or more formal, or more scarves, or whatever.
It's normal for a romantic partner to encourage and refine their partner's
style of dress and aesthetics, and it's usually done willingly by flexible
people.

Now, if a girl wrote, "I prefer to find a guy who is quality that other women
might overlook, I reckon you can always teach a man how to dress better" would
you have batted an eyelid? I doubt it.

> I mean, would you be comfortable with a girl that you wanted to date reading
> this post?

Yes.

> Speculating on her "quality" as if she was a horse.

No. It's okay to have standards. This isn't kindergarten where everyone is
special.

~~~
saikat
> It's normal for a romantic partner to encourage and refine their partner's
> style of dress and aesthetics, and it's usually done willingly by flexible
> people.

Yes, that's why you stated it as basically "you can always change the girl to
fit your tastes." Nothing about your statement implied (or stated, for that
matter) any kind of mutual understanding or flexibility - just your ability to
change a girl to your liking.

> Now, if a girl wrote, "I prefer to find a guy who is quality that other
> women might overlook, I reckon you can always teach a man how to dress
> better" would you have batted an eyelid? I doubt it.

Yes, and I bet most here would. Most independent people (which I believe many
entrepreneurs are) dislike being told what to do. Even the tone of your
statement shows a bit of bitterness at your belief that it's ok for a woman to
"change" her man and not the other way around.

~~~
awa
> Now, if a girl wrote, "I prefer to find a guy who is quality that other
> women might overlook, I reckon you can always teach a man how to dress
> better" would you have batted an eyelid? I doubt it.

I dunno whether my girl friend thought that before/after meeting me but she
has definitely influenced my dressing habits over time and plays a big role
when I am buying new clothes or deciding what to wear to a party/occasion. And
I don't really mind that and the same is true for her, I do get a say on what
she wears.

------
mechanical_fish
So, this post is lots of fun, and I want to encourage folks to do more
blogging where they take a bunch of data, graph it up, and test hypotheses
with it. Science is great!

On the other hand, though I rarely cite Zed Shaw, I have a special fondness
for the theme of his classic article "Programmers Need to Learn Statistics or
I Will Kill Them All":

<http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html>

... and I used to review journal articles, so I can't resist nitpicking by
pointing out that some of these conclusions are a lot more dubious than
others. For example, this sentence:

 _For women, a smile isn’t strictly better: she actually gets the most
messages by flirting directly into the camera..._

Appears to be based on the difference between 9.1 new monthly contacts and 9.3
new monthly contacts in each category. Is that statistically significant? I
rather doubt it. The correct conclusion here is almost certainly "making a
flirty face is not significantly more effective than smiling, _and_ you have
to be sure to do it into the camera or the result will be a disaster, so
smiling might be the more reliable tactic."

Of course, if you _really_ want to start picking nits you can bring up the
need for some kind of multifactor analysis to correct for the fact that
certain kinds of pictures are probably correlated with certain kinds of
personalities. But that would go beyond what _I_ understand. And it's not
actually necessary to try for a Ph.D. every time you throw up a graph or two.

Good fun! Publish more raw data and we can turn this into an great statistics
problem set.

~~~
mhartl
It's worth noting in this context that the poster, Christian, is probably
OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder, who has a math degree from Harvard. So
I'd guess the results are pretty solid, though I agree it would be nice to see
the raw data as well.

------
mcantor
So I need to get ripped like Jesus, then take a shirtless self-picture while
petting my cat, playing the guitar and not-smiling at something off-camera.

See you soon, ladies!

~~~
callmeed
Don't forget to hide the beer bottles

~~~
bugs
Normal people just throw them out.

~~~
ironkeith
You should be recycling, you're wasting valuable nickels.

~~~
bugs
Recycling is not reasonable where I live ( even if I want local trash pickup I
have to pay a company that isn't the city), but throwing out and recycling
should be synonomous where recycling is popular or common.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
should be ?

they connote which bin to place the item in..

------
gyardley
Intrigued that the 'MySpace pose' is both the most widely known and most
effective strategy for women, even though it's often ridiculed.

Did the population of MySpace naturally _evolve_ the optimal strategy for
socializing, without anyone consciously realizing it? In an established social
network, do the best strategy and the most common strategy gradually coincide?

~~~
msluyter
I was also quite surprised by this, and also that the article didn't mention
the other advantage of the myspace pose: it greatly masks weight.

~~~
dkarl
A Myspace pose is also a good indicator that a girl is fun (meaning interested
in sex) and doesn't demand much taste or sophistication. I've been on way too
many dates with women who turned out to be wine snobs, music snobs, fashion
snobs, literature snobs, or even TV snobs, who lost interest as soon as they
realized I didn't meet their particular snob standards. People who are
committed to being "better than" in any way would never post something as
cliché and tasteless as a Myspace pose. Honestly, for the long term I'm
looking for someone whose snob standards are sufficiently aligned with mine,
but sometimes it's nice to go out with someone with no standards. (Actually,
they have standards, but they're the kind of standards that can be applied
before agreeing to a date.)

------
maxklein
Rather than spending 2 years in the gym, one could just borrow the neighbours
dog and get even more responses.

~~~
seldo
I fired off an email to my dog-owning friend the moment I hit that graph.

~~~
stevenj
To borrow, or to inform?

~~~
seldo
To borrow. He's married (Hence the dog. Dogs are like training wheels for
people planning to have kids.).

------
z8000
"Maybe women want a little mystery. What is he looking at? Slashdot? Or
Engadget?"

That made me chuckle. Yes, that's _exactly_ what she is wondering!

~~~
chubbard
ah yes when it's probably just run of the mill porn. mystery over ladies.

------
matrix
For those interested in more information derived from data mining online
dating data sets, you'll find Andrew Fiore's work at Berkeley and MIT
interesting - see the Papers section on this site:

<http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~atf/dating/>

------
barrkel
ISTM there's a strong risk here of mixing different people with different
agendas. If some people are trolling for casual relationships, it's likely
they're evaluating profiles in a different way than those who are looking for
something more. Also, those looking for casual hookups are likely to be more
active users, so over-represented in the "success" metrics.

~~~
pgbovine
in general, okcupid is known more for casual hookups and flings than finding a
serious marriage partner, so i think the results are pretty insightful for
their target demographic

~~~
nostrademons
I don't think that's really true - most of my friends who have used it were
looking for potentially long-term relationships. Most of them have also
complained about how hard it is to find long-term partners on OKCupid. So I
think it's more likely that OKCupid is _used_ to find long-term relationships,
but it's _successful_ at casual flings. (Which makes perfect sense, since long
term relationships take a long time and a lot of effort, so naturally you'll
see fewer of them.)

~~~
gridspy
That is a lot like most systems where once there is a successful matchup, the
partners are removed from the system.

So, most likely there are fewer suitable long term partners left in the dating
pool on any successful site.

------
timmaah
They act like the photo is all that decides if someone will make contact or
not. Is it possible that people that don't look into the camera also haven't
put much time into the rest of their profiles, thus lower contact rate?

I do love that they publish this info so openly and in such a readable format.

~~~
wvenable
They do talk about controlling for profile quality.

This isn't the first stats post from OkCupid, they do this every few months
approaching a different aspect of the profile. There are previous entries
about race, religion, contents of the first message, and so on.

------
pyre
Why are all of the x-axises drawn at different points on the y-axis? The
x-axis for "The Effect of a Woman's Facial Attitude" is just below 8.7, but
for "The Effect of a Man's Facial Attitude" it's at just below 0.6. And in
both diagrams which are supposedly comparing the same thing the y-axis
represents different information (i.e. "women met per contact" vs "new
contacts monthly")

I also find the style of graph misleading. It makes it look like the the
numbers that go below the drawn x-axis are negative y-values, but they're not.
They are just positive values that are less than where they chose to draw the
axis.

It's the same with "Popular Female Photo Contexts." The x-axis is drawn at
just below 9 contacts made monthly and all graph values that are less than
that are drawn in grey (instead of color) which further misleads to the
viewer/reader into thinking, at glance, that the values are negative. Which
doesn't necessarily make sense (you can't have negative contacts per month),
but why not just start the x-axis at y=0 and be done with it? The relative
sizes of the numbers would be the same.

~~~
Perceval
At the very beginning of the article the author writes: _All my bar charts are
zeroed on the average picture._

------
orblivion
> For women, a smile isn’t strictly better

That's because some people make forced smiles. The Asian lady on the left
might look a lot better with a more subtle smile.

~~~
khafra
Repeat the study for Duchenne vs. Pan-American smiles?

------
og1
None of the male photo contexts are mutually exclusive. You could satisfy all
of them, even the bad ones at the same time.

------
icefox
The most interesting things I found in the article had to be the "doing
something interesting". To get a date you need to have a conversation and
having something interesting makes that easier. This makes a lot of sense
after the fact, but not something I had thought about before.

For example a photo of yourself with a NES controller in your hand playing
Mario 3. While I would have thought this would be a very 'bad' photo it might
actually be very good because it is an easy fun (happy childhood memory for
both sexes of a certain age) topic to start with.

------
dlytle
I thought the "having animals" numbers were pretty interesting too; it looks
like having a pet in the picture may lead to a fairly sizable increase in
contact rates.

~~~
timmaah
For men.. for females it is the worst possible context they graphed.

Having an animal tells a female the male is responsible and cares for others??

~~~
barrkel
And on the other hand, it seems more likely to lead to a real conversation.

~~~
huherto
yeah. Same for the guitar. It is a good conversation starter.

~~~
nihilocrat
Precisely. This is nothing new. Go to a park with a dog or a guitar (that you
can play, of course). See what happens versus going there to just take a walk.

------
lpolovets
I wonder if blog posts like this noticeably affect the trends on the site.
(e.g. will okcupid see a higher proportion of photos w/pets in the near
future?)

Also, the idea of applying results like these seems suboptimal. If you didn't
post a shirtless photo or your cropped Rover out of your shot, then that is a
hint about your personality and your priorities. Perhaps tweaking your photos
will get a higher conversion rate but a lower quality of conversions.

------
gruseom
I don't like the way these people restrict the axes on their charts to make
their data look more significant than it is (e.g.
<http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/four_myths/women_smiling.png>). I seem to recall
that they did this in earlier posts too.

~~~
pgbovine
good point, but if they are trying to show a relative (percentage) difference,
then their restricted axes make sense, right? perhaps they should be labeled
with percentage differences as well as absolute diffs

------
dryicerx
_Correlation does not imply Causation_

For example, people who are more interesting, approachable and extroverted
just happen to make more eye contact, not the other way around. Or girls who
are more outgoing, open and easy-going are willing to expose a bit more and
simply go with the 'myspace cleavage shot'

Either way, a fascinating data analysis!

~~~
Tichy
Yeah but on a dating site you don't see how
interesting/approachable/extroverted somebody is, you just see if they make
eye contact in their picture or not. Even if you are very introverted, you
could still create a photograph looking into the camera or showing cleavage
(if you are a girl).

~~~
rudin
You could, but would it have any effect? I'd like to see okcupid doing some
controlled experiments and see if stuff like changing the photo to look into
the camera works or if people don't look into the camera for another reason
that correlates negatively with attraction.

The aspect of "signalling" how biological animals act a certain way to show
abilities (i.e. stick out chest for masculinity) is interesting because there
is so much room for cheating. I wonder if we are hard wired in a sense to only
signal the truth or if there is a arms race going on between the cheaters and
the evaluaters.

------
seldo
As usual, I would love to see the same-sex data. I'm willing to bet that gay
men are MUCH more interested in good abs.

------
jff
Not too much mystery when somebody is looking off-camera while taking a webcam
shot... he's looking at the screen to click "take picture"! But don't tell the
ladies or they'll stop emailing me.

------
angusgr
I hadn't noticed some of the other blog posts until they were pointed out to
me, but they're worth looking at.

"Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back", "Rape Fantasies and Hygiene
By State" etc.

------
greenlblue
You guys don't get it. The whole point is to convey yourself and not some
pretend version that will get the most dates.

~~~
philwelch
Yes--thankfully, my identity doesn't hinge on whether or not I'm looking at
the camera or smiling, so there's nothing "pretend" about me composing my
self-portraits one way or the other in respect to those.

