OLD studies contain the most objective data we've ever had on the effect of looks on dating, so people are right to hold those studies in high regard

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yungthrowaway97 · 2021-07-04T04:31:33+00:00

I love OLD because it is the women's desire with no social repercussions or social fears. They aren't pressured. It is the perfect environment to know if a woman actually is attracted to you or not. I prefer that to mutual friends because I'm not forcing something with someone who isn't my type. I do admit that I always feel I am settling when I date women online. But settling isn't all bad. You never feel insecure in the relationship being the settler.

Low_Perspective_4055 · 2021-07-03T23:07:19+00:00

Yes economists call this type of study a "revealed preference" study which is much much more reliable than a "stated preference" study like a survey. You're basically only as hot as the number of matches you get.

Flightlessbirbz · 2021-07-04T16:46:14+00:00

I mean yeah, insight can definitely be gained from online dating, but it still has undeniable limits. A photo and a short bio are not a person, and yet that’s all there is to go by. I’m not going to sit here and say looks don’t matter, everyone knows that’s not true, but of course people are going to be even more shallow when you’re literally reduced to a photo and a few words. Plus photos are not that accurate, and most men don’t seem to understand that you have to go out of your way to make yourself look better in photos or you’re look way worse than you really do. Women have been perfecting the art of taking pics of themselves and their friends since they were like 13.

Mocha-Beans · 2021-07-03T23:30:18+00:00

The only gripe I have about guys bringing up OLD is that they never acknowledge the data about how men select women.

If I say most men won’t date black women and bring up the OKC and PoF study, I get downvoted and told that’s not true.

343_peaches_and_tea · 2021-07-03T20:50:11+00:00

OLD is a lens.

It highlights some features and dampens others.

What you see in photos isn't a real person. It's a projection of that person.

Different lenses highlight different qualities. Imagine if there was a dating platform where all you managed to experience of a person was their voice. Suddenly different people would start to succeed and others would fail.

OLD studies are good at determining what works in OLD. The obsession with a 'chad' jawline comes from the incredible focus on photography. People with aquare and defined jawlines translate well to photos. Have you ever met a person in real life who's attractive but then you've looked at their photos and been confused why they look so bad? Some people are just not photogenic. OLD penalises these people.

Fun little fact for UK people. Apparently in person ex labour leader Ed Milliband was good looking and incredibly charismatic. Through the screen and on TV and he was geeky and nerdy acting.

https://www.ft.com/content/78e93306-4331-11e4-8a43-00144feabdc0

Some people just don't translate well into photography. My wife cannot take a good photo to save her life. She looks derpy in every single one. In real life though she looks different and is much more attractive than her photos. Probably because she has quite a round face.

If you have another more objective way to measure the magnitude of effect of looks on men's dating, feel free to suggest it in the comment section below

Just to address this point. I don't have better data. But just because there aren't better studies doesn't mean that you can't criticize the studies we do have. It's okay to be skeptical and say "we don't have much objective information at all".

EDIT: I'm also not saying we should throw it out as data. Just be very very careful about interpretation and understand the limitations of OLD studies.

yodreadd · 2021-07-04T14:38:20+00:00

At least in the USA, in mid-2013, was said that "more than 1/3 of U.S. marriages begin with online dating, and those couples may be slightly happier than couples who meet through other means" (source). By 2019, "meeting online has become the most popular way U.S. couples connect, Stanford sociologist finds" (source).

Therefore, if someone is saying that online dating is not valid, that it cannot be taken seriously, just ignore them. Because they're ignoring facts, so you can ignore them.

WerewolfPleasant · 2021-07-04T19:45:49+00:00

If its hopeless why do you bother trying to convince anyone? Feels like a validation post

2021-07-04T22:29:54+00:00

the data is not objective. it's just showing that girls will rank guys primarily on physical attractiveness in online dating which is logical when there's literally millions of guys to choose from. Ever thought about a guy having an actual personality? are women concerned with their own value / n count at all these days?

happygone25 · 2021-07-07T00:15:21+00:00

There is one thing OLD studies don't cover and it's what happens after the people meet. They could just have a chat, have a quick hookup or become life long partners.

Also, OLD is mostly younger men (3:1 ratio) which is not representative of the population.

Jaylen-Gads · 2021-07-03T20:00:11+00:00

u/Sherbertbacon made a valid argument against chadfishing a while back that I never thought of and I agree with him on it. Other than that, online dating is real life. If she swiped left on you on online dating chances are she would have ignored you irl. Women don’t care about your personality.

midwesternMD · 2021-07-03T20:01:17+00:00

I’m torn on this. I mostly agree with you that those results should be held in high regard (or at the very least, not disregarded). That said, I also see the value in not letting that data get inside your head.

I think those studies shed a lot of light on practical online dating behaviors that should shape how (or whether) we engage with online dating. Ie: If you’re hideous and striking out all the time, a better use of your time would be to work on getting fit before reattempting to do online dating.

But if you let that data paralyze you, you may not fully live your life.

Shirts_Pants · 2021-07-04T02:26:05+00:00

I dunno, as some people say OLD is a super common way of meeting nowadays, and the vast majority of guys in these couples, many who relate meeting through OLD, are hardly lookers. Maybe the guy wasn't necessarily the woman's first choice while swiping, but it shows you don't really need to be a stunner to make OLD work for you if you're a man. How loyal or hypergamous she will be? Maybe another story.

rickit3k · 2021-07-04T09:09:38+00:00

I ran a dating app, before I sold it a few years ago, so I consider my opinion at least somewhat relevant. Whereas you're absolutely right, that most women go after good-looking men in online-dating, the game changes significantly after a few dates. (If the less attractive ones even get there, but that's another story). We know from our members, that the most successful men to find LTRs are actually the ones with a 'great character' (and you could open an entire thread about what that means). Money plays a role too, but it's way more about 'stable income /'guy has his shit together' rather than being rich.

Online dating btw, now is 'real life', so we should rather talk about online vs. offline conversation.

goblin_champ · 2021-07-04T17:20:21+00:00

Well here is the thing. You cant see/feel personality on social media. Regardless of what platform.

So of course they are only gonna go by what they can see. Which is why looks become important on social media. Showing off an attractive lifestyle also helps.

But the truth is (as we all know from real life) that personality is important. Even the best looking guy will not have success with women if he doesnt know how to talk with women.

A guy who is a 6 will do much better if he has game and talks confidently to girls than a 9 who has bad social skills.

They dont know all that yet with online dating though. They just see a picture. But if you want to escalate and get to the next level, you will have to interact, at which point they will see your personality.

WhiskeyOnASunday93 · 2021-07-03T19:32:18+00:00

Online dating studies shows the importance of looks in the venue of online dating

ToughAnswers · 2021-07-03T19:42:33+00:00

They don't account for variables that are just about exclusively only detectable IRL, like charisma/swagger, smell, etc. The OLD studies may not capture these variables but they're still getting the guys' dicks wet.

roaming_bartender · 2021-07-03T22:25:29+00:00

That OkCupid "study" was done like a million years ago when the only guys who resorted to that particular site WERE ugly.

I don't think the young guys here realise that online dating was very different in 2009. OkCupid especially was a place for nerds who couldn't find a date. There was still a huge stigma around online dating because it was full of these guys. Of course 80% of the men on okcupid in 2009 are going to look unattractive to normal women who are out in the real world surrounded by normal men.

Fleischpeitsch · 2021-07-04T19:08:18+00:00

Red Pillers that rely on OkCupid data as proof that women are shallow are hilariously misinformed, as not a single one of them ever bothered to even read their own source.

In reality OkCupid proves that looks don't matter much to women, and they clearly said so multiple times in the article.

OkCupid: Your Looks and your Inbox

Male Messaging and Female Attractiveness

Our chart shows how men have rated women, on a scale from 0 to 5. The curve is symmetric and surprisingly charitable: a woman is as likely to be considered extremely ugly as extremely beautiful, and the majority of women have been rated about “medium.” The chart looks normalized, even though it’s just the unfiltered opinions of our male users.

When it comes down to actually choosing targets, men choose the modelesque. Someone like roomtodance above gets nearly 5 times as many messages as a typical woman and 28 times as many messages as a woman at the low end of our curve. Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages go to the best-looking third of women. 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.

Female Messaging and Male Attractiveness

As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable.

Number of Messages received versus Recipients Attractiveness

Finally, I just want to combine the two charts to emphasize how much fuller the inboxes of good-looking people get. I have scaled this graph to show multiples of messages sent to the lowest-rated people. For instance, the most attractive guys get 11× the messages the lowest-rated do. The medium-rated get about 4×.

Women sent 11 times as many messages to the most attractive men compared to the least attractive ones, and 4 times the amount to average men.

For men these numbers are 28 and 5. Men care much more about looks than women do, which OkCupid clearly spells out

This graph also dramatically illustrates just how much more important a woman’s looks are than a guy’s.

Men care much more about looks than women do, and the reply-rate charts further down illustrate it further.

Message Succes by Attractiveness for Female Senders

Message Success by Attractiveness for Male Senders

Everything about the OkCupid blog posts proves that looks don't matter much to women.

tl;dr: Women might rate most men as below average (although that's another issue that has to do with automated messaging for rating 3 or higher), but when it comes to sending out messages or replying looks don't matter much to them.

wtknight · 2021-07-03T19:25:26+00:00

Given how easy it is to poison the well of traditional, self-reported surveys of male SMV, online dating studies represent a treasure trove of objective data on what women do when no one is around to judge them on their choices.

And what they do show is that, although average women are visually attracted to a minority of men, they end up messaging and probably dating other men who they don't find as visually attractive but who are more in their league, and who might be "attractive" in other ways like having a good job or seeming like they have a nice personality. I am not sure how the famous OKCupid study contradicts any other studies in this regard.

Anything from Tinder is going to be skewed first of all since the number of men and actual women on there is not equal, and it will also be representative of only the type of woman who is into casual sex because, while Tinder is sometimes used for dating purposes, most often it is used for hook-ups. Therefore, data from there probably would not be better than data from a scientific study.

neubs · 2021-07-03T20:03:00+00:00

Not all of the women are doing online dating though. I live in a lower populated area and make my search area include about 100,000 people. There are only about 100 women in tinder ages 18 to 35 and it doesn't take long for the app to tell me I've seen everyone.

The reality is that most women are meeting men through mutual friends somehow so most women require some form of vetting to get someone to date. Men don't care about that as much so that is why 10 times more men are in online dating. All these studies show is that the type of woman who would do online dating is mostly interested in looks and this is partially because they have so many options.

bitchypants · 2021-07-04T00:13:18+00:00

OLD studies are great predictors of how women who use dating apps act. And before you say most dating happens online, two things.

1) There’s a huge selection bias here. Women who sit and swipe on Tinder are a very specific type of woman. Looking for men, creating a profile, sitting there and swiping…

Additionally where I used to live, there were strong dating app preferences. When I moved, the preferences were different (OKCupid was great, when I moved it sucked). So there’s definitely some potential for sampling bias based on “this app is for hookups” or “this app is for LTR.”

2) Most importantly, I just looked up a study about who uses OLD. Even among young people it’s literally around 20%. This internet bubble we live in makes us way way over estimate how common OLD is.

So it’s a sample size of 1/5 women at best, and even then it’s the chicks that actually apply themselves on the dating app.

Det_Steve_Sloan · 2021-07-04T11:16:35+00:00

It's bullshit. I am consistently amazed at the hobbit-tier boyfriends ultra hot girls have in real life. It's pretty much the same on Facebook.

ChibsFilipTelfordd · 2021-07-03T21:06:51+00:00

I would be happy to take OLD studies as gospel when ACTUAL SCIENTIFIC SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES are performed.

The OKC survey, Ashley madison survey, etc. Those are not studies. They are surveys. Chadfishing is literally just one sample.

I'm sure actual research is out there... But it's more convenient to cite surveys that you can link to from OKC

nationearthdotcom · 2021-07-03T20:00:25+00:00

Nah the issue is this:

Being rich, tall, attractive: all positive things Not being rich, tall, or attractive: not a negative thing

It isn’t black and white and obsessing over these studies just make your mental state worse which makes you a less appealing partner and then you feed into your confirmation bias and end up alone.

Fightingspirit12345 · 2021-07-03T20:19:37+00:00

My sisters are known as attractive yet they date average looking broke dudes so idk

DukeInterior · 2021-07-04T07:42:00+00:00

They don't, because they reflect online dating only. They don't reflect what women and men go for in real life, just in the artificial and overly superficial online dating marketplace.

You can't generalise from studies about online dating to in-person interactions, because there are a huge range of factors that differ between those. The data is descriptive, it doesn't say what people will do, only what they have done in this specific circumstance. And there is something useful to be gained from that, but it doesn't tell us much about situations outside of it.

Fleischpeitsch · 2021-07-04T11:19:56+00:00

The problem with OkCupid data is that incels can't read.

OkCupid directly says that looks matter much more to men and that women don't care about them all that much, yet incels will use the OkCupid data as proof that women only want the top 20% of men

Title	OLD studies contain the most objective data we've ever had on the effect of looks on dating, so people are right to hold those studies in high regard
Author	majani
Upvotes	142
Comments	308
Date	July 3, 2021 7:19 PM UTC (5 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/od4hes/old_studies_contain_the_most_objective_data_weve/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/old-studies-contain-the-most-objective-data-weve.788525 https://theredarchive.com/post/788525

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