Another reddit user posts online dating profiles as a hot girl, a hot guy, an average girl, and an average guy. He wrote the reports here, claims looks are massively important - thoughts?

2014-02-25T14:59:09+00:00

Online dating removes the aspect of emotional vibing. Online dating means judging someone SOLELY on their appearance. People are actually less empathetic.

In-person interactions are much, much, much, much less superficial. Well, at least with respect to looks. In-person interactions are more about your emotional vibe, charisma, confidence, etc. rather than your looks. Looks are so much less important to the point where looks virtually don't matter for 99% of guys.

bigblackdikk · 2014-02-25T15:41:06+00:00

From a research standpoint, there is a lot of things wrong or left out here to make the author's conclusions representative for all people.

Biased selection All responses were from people with OK Cupid accounts. That already preselects a certain population segment (demography, psychology, life style). They were also all aged 24, in LA, USA.

People making OK Cupid accounts may be more receptive to casual meets. That is to say, they are more shallow people.

They are aged 24, in LA - this has lifestyle implications

The population sample is unknown
He uses nominal (qualitative) scale to identify his test groups "hot" and "average". Also respondents were rated as 7/10+. We have no pictures for reference as to how the author determined his qualitative assessment of how hot the individuals were.
We have no idea what he said in his messages to people.

There is also no comparison with control groups, and no systematic research (i.,e testing it with a 1/10 profile, 2/10, 3/10, 4/10, 5/10 -and yes, by nature this would be very hard to do since it is qualitative, hence my previous point).

So this 'research' is not representative and should be taken with a grain of salt. However, it does not take a lot of research to know that attractively looking people do better than their less attractive counterparts. Which is the only thing this research successfully points out.

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