
Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back (WRT Online Dating) - noodle
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/
======
tlrobinson
While this is an interesting analysis, I don't think you should be labeled
"racist" if you aren't attracted to people of races other than your own.

~~~
psyklic
Years ago I thought this as well. However, once I became good friends with
people of different races, I started to become attracted to more people of
those races as well.

So, I definitely do think that there is some component of "racism" to this,
even though it may be subconscious.

~~~
stcredzero
I need to be thankful for the song "The Lakes of Pontchartrain." If it wasn't
for the line "handsome young creole girl" I wouldn't have been curious enough
to date my present girlfriend, who is African American. We've now been going
out for almost 3 years, and I'm happier than I've ever been. I've also
discovered a lot about what subconscious racism I've been carrying around in
my head.

There is racism. You can't be black and have a conversation with your sons and
your brothers in a parking lot. The police _will_ come by and harass you. This
despite the fact that my girlfriend's uncle is a wonderful, industrious,
upstanding ex-military man. You can be white and do this, though. (This was
not some seedy parking lot in a run-down neighborhood in the big city. It
happened in a rural town of only 16,000.)

------
JacobAldridge
I'm really enjoying this series of posts.

Did anyone else think this one had a little more interpretative language,
though? "sweethearts" "nails in coffins" or "schizophrenia of people’s racial
attitudes" all seem to distract from letting the figures speak for themselves,
and given the explosive potential in the figures I guess the less editorial
comment the better.

Edit - I'd also like to see a brief post that just looks at the zodiac chart.
Would be the best place to send every zodiac-preacher I know to 'disprove' so
much of what they argue (excepting the Capricorns, because they don't listen
to evidence anyway).

~~~
rsheridan6
>Did anyone else think this one had a little more interpretative language,
though? "sweethearts" "nails in coffins" or "schizophrenia of people’s racial
attitudes" all seem to distract from letting the figures speak for themselves,
and given the explosive potential in the figures I guess the less editorial
comment the better.

Agreed. I have alternative interpretations. "sweetheart" -> "desperate,"
"shitty" (used to describe white guys who don't answer) -> "in a position to
be choosy." Naturally, the more replies you get, the more picky you'll be.

~~~
shiranaihito
Right. Black women were the "sweethearts", and consistently found to be
unfortunate in all of the categories.

It also happens that black women are the only group I don't find attractive.

Does that make me a racist? Especially when black males' answer to "would you
strongly prefer to date someone of your own skin color" was a resounding "
_Hell_ no"..

By the way, I've got one friend who doesn't like Asian women, and another who
_only_ likes Asian women. Go figure.

( I'm a white guy )

------
pg
Sometimes the comments on HN are more interesting than the article. This isn't
one of those times. This article is full of surprises, whereas the comments
are fairly predictable.

I wonder what the pattern is. Which articles tend to yield boring comment
threads? Ones that involve politics? Ones that invoke identity?

What I'd really like to find are simple, automatic ways of detecting boring
comment threads. I know one that works: more comments than points. Anyone have
any suggestions for others?

~~~
noodle
seems like most submissions that have more comments than points tend to be
boring/predictable. not always, but its a good indicator, as controversial
topics tend to have most comments fall into certain predictable buckets.

~~~
pg
Sorry, I was editing my comment to mention this while you were suggesting it.
That does in fact work very well.

~~~
noodle
no worries.

just off the top of my head, i'd say that there's probably some sort of
relationship between the points on the submission and the average points per
comment in the comments.

------
lionhearted
This was a comment to the Okcupid post:

> A lot of dating and who a person would consider for relationships is based
> on social, cultural and economic considerations, and it’s a simple and
> unfortunate fact that generally speaking whites are at the higher end of the
> social and economic spectrums.

I just wanted to call that out in case anyone has been taught that way, but
not had a chance to think it through clearly. Becoming successful doesn't make
the rest of humanity less successful - it makes them more successful.

It's not a "simple and unfortunate fact" that Vietnamese people immigrating to
America revolutionized nail salons and made them affordable to almost all
women while making themselves wealthy.

It's not a "simple and unfortunate fact" that many of the greatest American
scientists of the last 100 years have been Ashkenazi Jewish.

And so on. It's not unfortunate when one group of people is succeeding - it
brings up all of the rest of humanity. One group of people succeeding is not
unfortunate; others failing is unfortunate and we can work to rectify that,
but never feel guilty about succeeding and prospering.

~~~
kgrin
The "unfortunate" comment seemed to be directed at the _relative inequality_ ,
not the fact that whites are "succeeding". I think it's pretty tough to make
the case that economic and educational inequality in the United States _along
racial lines_ is intrinsically a good thing, particularly given the historical
context.

Inequality may be the least-bad outcome given the menu of potential remedies
("Harrison Bergeron" and all that), but it's not a great thing in and of
itself. Particularly given the historical and occasional modern-day evidence
of straight-up racism (see:
[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DXK/is_9_20/ai_10452...](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DXK/is_9_20/ai_104521293/)
), I think it's reasonable to at least scrutinize situations of high
inequality to figure out whether they are, in fact, just caused by some people
working harder or being more lucky or what have you, or whether there are
actual problems.

On the merits, though, I think OKCupid's matching algorithm (the questions)
theoretically accounts for the social, economic and cultural differences -
what their data shows ("suggests" is probably more appropriate) is that people
react to race _even after controlling for the other factors_ , which is at
least interesting.

Edit: just to clarify and follow up - here's my claim: if the relative
dominance of Ashkenazi Jews among American scientists, or Vietnamese women
among nail-salon entrepreneurs, were the result of, say, discrimination, or
government subsidies at others' expense, or some sort of other external factor
that made the "competition" unfair, then it would be fair to categorize that
inequality as "unfortunate". As far as I'm aware, that's not the case for
either of those examples (and in fact is somewhat the opposite). But if it
were (and the author of the original comment we're talking about seems to make
that assumption about whites being better off on many socioeconomic measures),
then calling that inequality "unfortunate" wouldn't be out of line.

~~~
lionhearted
> I think it's pretty tough to make the case that economic and educational
> inequality in the United States along racial lines is intrinsically a good
> thing, particularly given the historical context.

I'll address it, but before I do - look at how you framed the question and
response. It's mildly disingenuous and makes it hard to have a discussion.
Take this:

"I think it's pretty tough to make the case that economic and educational
inequality in the United States along racial lines is intrinsically a good
thing"

I don't know anyone that's making that claim. I mean that literally - I don't
know anyone who says, "Economic and educational inequality along racial lines
is a good thing." Most certainly I didn't make the claim, and I don't know of
anyone that has.

But let's talk about relative inequality, because it's important. Take some
groups of people - could be race, gender, religion, favorite color of car,
anything. Some of the groups are doing better than others.

Is there a problem there? Well, sure, there is. You've got some people not
doing as well as the rest of people. It'd be good for them to do better.

But is the problem that there are others that are doing well? Well, this comes
down to how you think the world operates. Is most wealth created by people
benefiting humanity or destroying humanity?

This can actually be looked into, and generally speaking, the way to get
wealthy is to benefit humanity. This is kind of new thinking though - the old
world thinking is that stealing from and oppressing people was what successful
people were doing. This leads to innate hostility to people doing well, which
is misplaced. The path to wealth these days to benefit other people, as
Vietnamese entrepreneurs and Jewish scientists have done.

So here's what I'm saying: You should do the best you can. If someone is not
doing as well as you, it would be good for them to do better. It would not be
good for you to do worse. You should not feel guilty or uneasy about doing
well, or about the race or religion you're part of doing well. You can feel
bad that other races or religions aren't doing as well. But you should always
feel good that you're doing well, and keep trying to do well, and do right as
much as you can while doing well.

~~~
kgrin
If I misunderstood your point, I apologize. Care to correct?

Here's what I understood to be the debate:

Original comment you quoted: > A lot of dating and who a person would consider
for relationships is based on social, cultural and economic considerations,
and it’s a simple and unfortunate fact that generally speaking whites are at
the higher end of the social and economic spectrums.

Your response (paraphrased, I hope fairly): Vietnamese entrepreneurs and
Jewish scientists did quite well, and that's not unfortunate at all.
Inequality isn't inherently bad, and we should focus on bringing people up
rather than down (or for people to bring themselves up, etc.)

Either your response is a bit of a non-sequitur, or the logical inference is
that the fact "whites are at the higher end of the socio-economic spectrum"
isn't 'unfortunate' (which is sort of a squishy word, but that's just the OP's
language). I understood that to be the point you were responding to - if
that's wrong, then I apologize and please do set me straight.

 _My_ point was that the OP calling better socio-economic 'outcomes' for
whites "unfortunate" is pretty reasonable, as there's a good deal of evidence
to suggest that it's not just the result of benign factors (see: history of
slavery and segregation; evidence of present-day racism, as in the article I
linked).

Likewise (and I sort of hate to use this example), a monopolist's market
dominance may be the result of a superior product, or an unfair/illegal abuse
of [whatever]. In the latter case, calling that monopolist's position
"unfortunate" doesn't seem out of bounds - _even if the best remedy is to
bring the other market actors up, or even do nothing_.

You called the OP out on calling white advantages "unfortunate" - I'm saying,
it is.

~~~
lionhearted
> If I misunderstood your point, I apologize. Care to correct?

You actually made quite good points. The problem that I see, though, is people
often feel guilty for being successful just by virtue of being white, and it
causes all sorts of other problems.

I'll tell you about my own bloodlines real quick - as far back as I can trace
my ancestry, we've got no oppressors/thieves/etc. No one in my family has ever
owned slaves, for instance, and we went from lower class to middle class only
in the last generation. If I make it myself, I'll be self made wealthy, and my
children (only half-Caucasian) will be the first in my bloodlines to be born
into wealth.

> You called the OP out on calling white advantages "unfortunate" - I'm
> saying, it is.

I don't think it's unfortunate when white people are doing well, or when
anyone is doing well. It's unfortunate when people are doing poorly, but there
should be no personal guilt or unease, just a general sense of "let's fix
this" - the negative emotions are counterproductive on many levels.

On a personal level, I've taken very few if any benefits from American
society, and learned a great deal of my lessons living in Europe and East
Asia, taking friends and lovers of all colors, and just learning a lot at the
sometimes-unpleasant school of hard knocks.

Personally, I feel no guilt at being white - but I was sort of raised to, like
most people born after 1970, and did for a while. You know what really broke
it for me? It's when I spent some time in England and saw lots of really
multiracial groups of friends - it was common to see a guy from Africa, a guy
with Middle Eastern blood, and a couple white guys hanging out. Or a Sri
Lankan first generation immigrant, Chinese 0.5 immigrant, Aussie, and a couple
Brits. They always "took the piss" out of me for being an American, but the
groups in London actually are a lot less aware of race. The guilt in America
over being white forces people constantly highlights our differences, which
actually perpetuates racism.

I don't want to ramble on too long, but here's two last thoughts:

1\. A lot of elitist white people think "those poor unsophisticated
[blacks/Asians/Hispanics], we've got to help them!" -> This leads to teachers
speaking slower to them, cutting them "breaks", etc, and there's been a lot of
research that when a teacher thinks a child is stupider or slower and teach
down to them, the student performs less well. So the, "Oh my, we white people
have exploited, and let's now make it right" has nasty secondary effects of
treating people like they're second class citizens and perpetuating the old
race roles.

2\. I see a lot of pro-minority groups that instead of taking a "pro-humanity"
stance, they take an adversarial "us vs. them" stance. It's understandable to
some extent, but it's a damn shame. As an example, look at how the Duke
Lacrosse case went down. That was really shameful. I've read a lot of Dr.
Martin Luther King's speeches, he was really a tremendous man. He was always
stressing that he wanted to see blacks and whites gathering together, doing
great things, supporting and working and serving great causes together. A lot
of leaders have gotten away from "let's work together, all races, for a better
world" to, "those no good people are exploiting us, let's get them back and
make sure we get ours". Maybe it's understandable, but I don't think it's so
helpful.

Guilt over being white is straight up a bad thing. People of Caucasian descent
have done bad things throughout history, as have people of African descent, as
have people of Arabic descent, as have people of Asian descent, and so on, and
so on. Hell, the things the Spanish, French, and British Empires did to some
of their colonies is more horrible than anything that happened in the United
States, but the lack of individual guilt among their descendants on racial
lines makes the societies closer knit and less racist. We need less "us vs.
them" - and thinking it's unfortunate that whites are doing well is still,
however well meaning, "us vs. them". Let's get people who could be doing
better up to speed, but let's also never feel guilty about becoming more
prosperous.

~~~
roundsquare
Not that I'm adding to the discussion, but I'm very impressed by the tone of
this discussion. Even on HN (where I tend to find people more willing to
debate (as opposed to argue)) discussions like this tend to get nasty. Cheers
to this!

------
llimllib
> It’s ironic that white guys are worst responders

Ironic means "surprising". When you just got done describing in detail how
white males get the best response from all other potential mates, the fact
that they respond the least is completely unsurprising.

~~~
vaksel
I don't think guy response rates are all that relevant. Let's face it, if a
chick is the one reaching out to you, chances are she is of the lower
caliber(a fatty). The good looking girls don't need to reach out, they get
thousands of emails a month, they don't need to bother looking for guys.

~~~
llimllib
except that the authors were talking about _relative_ response rates among men
of different races.

------
JesseAldridge
This reminds me of a study my dad mentioned to me not too long ago...

Here's the key graph: <http://imgur.com/bFcOw.png>

And his explanation:

"They gave 77 white female Michigan State students several standard measures
of racism at different times in their cycles. The "race bias" curve on the
graph is a combination of the measures.

Their interpretation is based on evolution, avoiding outgroup fathers who
won't be around to take care of the mother and child. One problem I see with
that interpretation is that it is better for evolution to mix genes as much as
possible. I don't really have a better explanation, though."

Also, this article seems relevant:
[http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ReproductiveHealth/Story?id=425...](http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ReproductiveHealth/Story?id=4258128)

 _"marriages between third or fourth cousins in Iceland tended to produce more
children and grandchildren than those between completely unrelated
individuals_ "

------
MarkPNeyer
These findings don't surprise me at all. I've always been baffled as to why
some people insist that Race, Culture, Gender, or Religion have no bearing on
anything. The problem is that if you make a statement like "race is a
predictor of academic success" you'll get labeled a racist.

~~~
dkarl
_if you make a statement like "race is a predictor of academic success" you'll
get labeled a racist_

Not necessarily. Whoever you're talking to will carefully consider your
language, tone, and any prior knowledge of you to figure out whether you're
going to use your statement to support or attack their political beliefs, and
then call you a racist as appropriate.

~~~
ErrantX
The problem is a vast number of people don't bother with the consideration
stage.

(I attribute that to trash media personally; but that is a vague thought I
haven't considered it too much)

EDIT: pop psychology. most people are massively influenced by society. Society
"on average" would probably judge such a statement as containing racist
overtones. _Gut_ jumps in because racism is an issue that we attach strong
emotions too (rightly). It takes a strong _Head_ to overcome emotions like
that.

------
emmett
Interesting to me: rate of reply seems inversely correlated with likelihood of
reply. That is, if you're likely to reply, other people are less likely to
reply to you.

My guess is that both of these things are correlated with social status.
People with high social status are likely to be sought after (high rate of
reply to their messages) and less likely to deign to reply (low rate of reply
to others messages). It's well known that white males are perceived with
highest social status, and black women with lowest, so these results make
perfect sense in that context.

~~~
tlrobinson
If you're more likely to reply, you're probably less picky. If you're less
picky then you're likely to take the "shotgun" approach of messaging many
people, regardless of whether it would be a good match. It shouldn't be
surprising if a higher percentage of those people don't respond than to those
who's approach is more targeted.

But to confirm this we'd need to see the average number of messages sent by
each group of people.

~~~
emmett
Average number of messages sent (and received) by race/gender would be a good
control for this study, I agree. That's a good point.

------
hughprime
There is, as I understand it, some evidence for the idea that people learn
what's attractive in a member of the opposite sex by essentially averaging out
all the faces which they see while growing up. This makes a helluva lot of
sense as an evolutionary strategy -- you learn what your species looks like by
observing as many other members as you can, and then you try to mate with the
least unusual-looking person you can. Aside from protecting your offspring
from the weird disability-causing genes which are sometimes signalled by
unusual-looking features, it's also a great strategy if you assume everyone
else is using it too: if you mate with a non-unusual looking partner you'll
get non-unusual-looking kids, who will then be sought-after mating partners.

Anyway, if our brains really do use this strategy I think it goes a long way
towards explaining some of this data.

edit: I don't mean to imply that this is the only criterion our brains use --
we probably find most attractive people who are slightly taller, more muscular
and/or larger-breasted than the average we see while growing up. However in
other things like facial structure where no particular face is objectively
fitter than any other, heading towards the average is a pretty good plan.

------
psyklic
What is even more shocking to me are the comments on OK Cupid to this post.
Many of the commenters who say they are black/Indian/etc seem to acceptingly
resign themselves to saying they're part of "less desirable" or "undesirable"
groups, as if as a person they are in fact undesirable. (e.g. "As a member of
a particularly undesirable racial group, ..." or "Some of us less desirable
types ...")

The real shocker though is who advocates for restricting searches by race!
From the comments, it is people who are part of undesirable groups who
actually want OKC to be race-aware and allow people to discriminate.

Clearly the data shows that there are biases toward certain races. However,
from my experience, finding potential dates online is a roller coaster ride.
It has ups and downs, and unfortunately we are always looking for what causes
those downs. After all, people just reject you without a reason!

With data like this, many people will just assume that RACE is the reason for
rejection -- something they cannot do anything about -- when it is more likely
something they can accommodate for. That is the real danger in reading too far
into these studies -- dating is all about _YOU_ , while these statistics are
all about _averages_!

------
kmcgivney
In the article, the most staggering bias was white women's preference for
white men, but also the general preference of women towards white men.

Given that these stats are coming from the USA, I think our culture -
television, movies, etc - provides us with ample images of white males in
positions of success and power. Maybe this sways women's perceptions?

------
raganwald
I'm confused by all the talk of the word "racist." The article didn't mention
the word "racist" in the title, and in fact the one time it talked about the
word, it was to debunk a straw man suggestion that racism is a factor.

Are people dragging their^H^H^H^H^H^H own^H^H^H other baggage into this
discussion?

~~~
tlrobinson
The part that caught my eye was the second sentence:

 _We’ve processed the messaging habits of almost a million people and are
about to basically prove that [...] racism is alive and well._

That's basically the thesis for the rest of the post.

~~~
raganwald
If that's the thesis for the post, I am underwhelmed, I see no evidence for
racism whatsoever as I understand the word. Maybe that's why I didn't see the
post as having anything to do with racism... Because it doesn't.

------
codexon
I think this only confirmed what many people have known from experience.

The most surprising part was the number of people who crawled out of the
woodwork who wanted to declare the results invalid or deny the racism:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/9pbn8/dating_statis...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/9pbn8/dating_statistics_online_shows_that_asian_females/)

[http://www.codexon.com/posts/okcupid-dating-statistics-
shows...](http://www.codexon.com/posts/okcupid-dating-statistics-shows-racism-
very-much-alive#comments)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851290>

------
johnnybgoode
Did they take class into account at all? That could explain some of the
results. Or even if they did, and all of these stats have been adjusted for
class, carryover from class stereotypes could still explain the results.

~~~
hughprime
There are a zillion factors which haven't been corrected for. As well as
class, they include message length, message quality, profile quality, number
of messages received on average by each class of respondee, income, education,
number of cats owned and whether or not the man's profile consists of a
shirtless photo posing in front of his Honda Civic (and I don't know why that
mental image came to mind).

I imagine you could, by using fake profiles and fake messages, do a controlled
experiment which took all these factors out. My guess would be that you'd
still see a vaguely similar effect but that it would be much less pronounced.

~~~
araneae
Agreed. I think message quality would be highly significant, because black
males (not to generalize or anything) are much more likely to use netspeak
such as "yo" or "wut" that we learned earlier were response killers. Of
course, maybe the _reason_ women don't like these words is because "yo" is a
"black" word.

I didn't even think about the money thing, but we do know that women care an
awful lot about it. Who knows; a lot of the blatant racism towards black men
(i.e. in the self report section) could be because women generalize that black
men are poor. It could also explain why everyone seems to want to get with a
white dude; he's more likely to be rich/have higher status.

------
DavidSJ
Correlation ≠ Causality.

There's no controlled experiment here. Just a bunch of data mining, with
_some_ variables controlled for.

~~~
dusklight
They never claimed causality.

And they also state at the end of the article that they do not have a
representative sample of the population.

But if you do use the website and surf through some profiles, it becomes
pretty clear that the majority of the users are, as the article states,
younger, more educated, and more progressive than the average American. I
would go even further and say that the vast majority of the users would not
self-identify themselves as racist.

Now question for OKCupid would be, wouldn't it be interesting if you could
make a table showing the relationship of race to socioeconomic status, and
then the breakdown of reply rate by socioeconomic status?

~~~
DavidSJ
You say, "they never claimed causality," but they say, "Your Race Affects
Whether People Write You Back" and "racism is alive and well".

------
parse_tree
How the heck is a preference in who you date "racism"? That's the stupidest
thing I've ever heard. People have strong preferences over all sorts of
superficial things - body type, hair color, hair style, breast size, height,
etc. Is it really so hard to believe that someone's preference for XXXX skin
tone is just as shallow as their preference for YYYY hair color? (I've yet to
see a commenter to a survey showing men prefer blonds point to it as evidence
of some deep seated prejudice/hatred said men have towards women of other hair
colors.)

