CMV: "Chadfishing experiments" don't prove what their proponents think

There’s a phenomenon called “Chadfishing” where someone creates a fake online dating profile of a “Chad” and posts screenshots showing how easily they could get matches or agreements to hook up. Often the “Chad” in question is presented as a terrible human, like a Nazi or a pedophile. Here’s a recent example that was posted in PPD.

Some arguments I’ve seen: these experiments “prove” that the red (or black) pill is correct, that women don’t actually care at all about personality, that this proves most women would hook up with a hot Nazi, and that women who claim otherwise are lying. I don’t think they do any of this.

The first problem is these “experiments” are not remotely scientific. I’m not demanding that they be done to the standards of an academic journal, but it’s usually just a handful of screenshots. How many women did they swipe on vs how many did they match? How many women were their profiles actually shown to (Tinder has a newbie boost so you could be shown to more women than you’ve had a chance to swipe on)? How many matches did they message, and how many responded positively to requests for sex? How much does “positively responding to a request for sex on Tinder” correlate to actually be willing to go through with it? How many women even noticed the "red flags" (e.g. in the link above, you could easily miss the swastika tattoo)? And could we be seeing a “publication bias” effect, where a hundred people do their own “Chadfish” and only the top 10 most shocking ones get attention?

That matters a lot for your conclusions. Perhaps a “Chadfisher” was shown to 500 women, got 100 matches, messaged them all asking to hook up, got 10 positive responses, and of those, only 5 were actually serious enough to go through with it. That 1% of women (who by virtue of being on Tinder are already pre-selected for being more sexually adventurous than average) would be willing to hook-up with a very attractive but morally dubious man would not be good evidence at all for red or black pill claims. But the screenshot of 10 women agreeing to sex would be all that anyone sees.

Maybe the true numbers are actually a lot higher than 1%. It could be 2%, 5% or 20% of women on Tinder who would be willing to hook up with these men. We can’t know without better experiments. However, I see no reason to believe it’s a majority of women, and especially not a large majority.

A couple of my old PPD threads are relevant here. One is “Most alleged cases of women’s hypocrisy arise from men confusing the behaviours of distinctly different women”. I don’t deny there are women out there who are looking to hook up with a hot guy and couldn’t give a toss about how awful he might be in other ways. But there are also women out there who aren’t interested in casual sex and would consider awful behaviour a deal-breaker. Human behaviour exists on a spectrum. It may be true that Nazi Chad would have no trouble having sex with a large number of women, but he doesn’t need a majority of women to be into him for that to be the case. So in that respect, I see no reason to believe that most women who claim they wouldn’t interested in “Nazi Chad” are lying or outliers.

Another is about how RPers often have a straw man version of what the “Blue Pill” is. The straw (or naive) Blue Pill goes something like “Looks don’t matter, be a nice guy!” and appears to be what a lot of RPers used to believe. For someone with those beliefs, Chadfishing experiments might indeed be a shock. But I argue that few adults (particularly those engaged enough to have an opinion on PPD) actually hold these views. A large majority of people acknowledge that women care about looks, that some can be especially shallow, and that some will overlook (or even be into) morally dubious (but hot) guys for casual flings. “Girl falls for the hot bad boy” is, after all, a trope as old as time. Maybe some people could be slightly surprised to the degree to which this is true, I’ll give you that. But I’m not really quibbling with that, it’s the “all women are sluts for Chad” mentality that is most wrong.

Finally, a retort that sometimes gets posted in Chadfishing threads is “What would happen with a gender-flipped version?” Well, there is an article in Cracked that is just that. The author created an OkCupid profile of an attractive 25-year-old woman who enjoys “knockin the cups out of homeless ppls hands”, bullying her 14-year-old sister’s friends, and pretending she’s pregnant to get money off people (and admits in messages that’s what she’d do to you if you have sex with her). She was deluged with messages.

I don’t either version gives us particularly strong insights into human nature. They both suffer from a selection bias (we only see who responded and not those who passed it up). However, if you want to say “there are a lot of horny men and women out there who will have sex with a hot person regardless of their other qualities”, that seems true. But they don’t show much more than that.