~ archived since 2018 ~

Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets [Brutch & Newman, 2018]

hirayama_ronin

August 9, 2018

19 upvotes

/r/BlackPillScience

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaap9815

Download the post

Want to save the post for offline use on your device? Choose one of the download options below:

PDF TXT EPUB

Post Information

Title	Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets [Brutch & Newman, 2018]
Author	hirayama_ronin
Upvotes	19
Comments	2
Date	August 9, 2018 9:07 AM UTC (7 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/BlackPillScience
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPillScience/comments/95uthj/aspirational_pursuit_of_mates_in_online_dating/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/BlackPillScience/aspirational-pursuit-of-mates-in-online-dating.305065 https://theredarchive.com/post/305065

Comments

[–]hirayama_ronin[S] 7 points8 points9 points 7 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

We need help understanding this graph.

(Top) Upper curves show probability density for women and men of the median desirability gap, the difference in desirability rank of receiver and sender of an initial contact. Both women and men tend to contact others who are ranked somewhat—but not excessively—higher than themselves. The lower curves show the probability of receiving a reply to an initial message given the desirability gap between sender and receiver. Women have higher overall probability of receiving replies, but both women and men have substantially lower probability of replies from more desirable partners. (Bottom) Lower curves show the average number of people contacted by individuals as a function of their average desirability gap. Upper curves show the interquartile range (IQR) of desirability of the people contacted, controlling for number of people contacted. Neither set of curves extends all the way to the left of the figure, because there is insufficient data to make reliable estimates in this regime.

Great job on not developing a robust definition of black pill science, by the way. Top form.

[–]SubsaharanAmericanshitty h-index4 points5 points6 points 7 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

Snarky jab aside, this is a nice contribution. It is consistent with Sprecher and Hatfield's thesis (covered here) that people aim high but ultimately settle for what they can get, and that this is the best explanation of ~~looksmatchism~~ why couples tend to match on desirability.

Regarding your question about the Fig. 3., a better explanation is found in the actual main text of the Results section:

In Fig. 3, we show statistics for messages sent and replies received as a function of “desirability gap,” the difference in desirability ranking between the senders and receivers of messages. If the least desirable man in a city were to send a message to the most desirable woman, then the desirability gap would be +1; if the most desirable man sent a message to the least desirable woman, then the gap would be −1.

The upper curves in the top panels of Fig. 3 show the distribution of desirability gaps in our four cities. For each individual, we compute the median desirability gap over all initial messages they send and then plot the probability density of these numbers for men and women separately. The most common (modal) behavior for both men and women is to contact members of the opposite sex who on average have roughly the same ranking as themselves, suggesting that people are relatively good judges of their own place in the desirability hierarchy. The distributions about this modal value, however, are noticeably skewed to the right, meaning that a majority of both sexes tend to contact partners who are more desirable than themselves on average—and hardly any users contact partners who are significantly less desirable. The curves are remarkably consistent across all four cities, with men and women on average sending messages to potential partners who are 26 and 23% further up the rankings than themselves, respectively. A tendency for messages to go to more desirable people is to some extent implicit in the PageRank measure, which often (although not always) rates people who receive a lot of messages as desirable; however, the details of the distribution, including modal value, skewness, consistency across cities, and difference between women and men, are by no means inevitable and contain real information about partner choice and attraction.

The lower set of curves in the top panels shows the probability of receiving a reply to an initial message. The curves are higher for messages sent by women than for those sent by men—women are more likely than men to receive replies—but among both women and men, the probability of a reply is a decreasing function of desirability gap, more desirable partners replying at lower rates than less desirable ones. The differences are stark: Men are more than twice as likely to receive a reply from women less desirable than themselves than from more desirable ones, and for messages sent to more desirable women, the reply rate never rises above 21%. Yet, the vast majority of men send messages to women who are more desirable than themselves on average. Messaging potential partners who are more desirable than oneself is not just an occasional act of wishful thinking; it is the norm.

The bottom panels of Fig. 3 show two further statistics that shed light on the mate-seeking strategies adopted by users of the site. The upper set of curves show the variation of desirability gaps across the potential partners a person contacts, quantified by the distance between the 25th and 75th percentiles in the distribution of desirability gaps. Conditioned on the number of messages sent, men and especially women who reach higher up the desirability ladder tend to write to a less diverse set of potential matches, in terms of desirability gap. This behavior, consistent across all four cities, indicates that mate seekers, and particularly those setting their sights on the most desirable partners, do not adopt a diversified strategy to reduce the risk of being rejected, as one might, for instance, when applying to universities (21).

The lower set of curves in the bottom panels shows the average number of messages sent by a woman or a man as a function of average desirability gap. Women initiate far fewer contacts than men, but both sets of curves fall off with increasing desirability gap in all four cities. One might imagine that individuals who make a habit of contacting potential partners significantly more desirable than themselves (large positive desirability gap) would also initiate more contacts overall to increase their chances of getting a reply, but they do the opposite: The number of initial contacts an individual makes falls off rapidly with increasing gap, and it is the people approaching the least desirable partners who send the largest number of messages. A possible explanation is that those who approach more desirable partners are adopting a “quality over quantity” approach, more precisely identifying people they see as an attractive match or spending more time writing personalized messages, at the expense of a smaller number of messages sent.

One interesting takeaway of the top panel's bottom curves is that a woman with a desirability gap of +1 has a similar probability of receiving a reply as a man with a desirability gap of -1. That is, the least desirable woman sending an initial message to the most desirable man can expect a reply rate on par with the most desirable man sending an initial message to the least desirable woman (~40-50%).

The IQR curves (bottom panel, top curves) aren't that surprising, if I'm interpreting it correctly (x = median desirability gap?). It seems intuitive the higher someone's median desirability gap is, the more selective they must be, and the more narrow their IQR would be.

The male side of the bottom curves in the bottom panel suggests... the messaging equivalent of right-swipe all?

I was actually more interested in Fig. 2. It's definitely r/hapas and black r/trufemcels-pinkpill fodder. It also seems to suggest black men do better, at least on this particular online service, in Seattle relative to the other large cities. All of this is consistent with other data covered on this sub (e.g., race & online dating stats, speed dating data showing a participant's history of increased %-minority exposure increased dating aversion towards that group, etc), but it would be nice to have more granularity on these results. Unfortunately, Table S2 in their Supplementary Materials is somewhat challenging to interpret (particularly for the interaction terms) and their figure legend for it (Section 1.2 of the SM) leaves quite a bit to be desired -- for instance, they note that Boston is a reference category but then leave it up to you to figure out the other reference categories (which turn out to be "Asian" for Ethnicity, and "College" for Education). It would have been ideal instead of, or in addition to, reporting the coefficient estimates, if they reported the marginal effects.

This paper would've also benefitted from including measures of the mate attributes generally found to be among the most salient determinants of desirability -- namely physical attractiveness (as assessed by independent raters) and height.