OkCupid is one of the largest online dating sites on the web. Before it was purchased by Match.com, there was a crack team of geeky researchers who poured through the data and reported interested findings on the OkCupid research blog, OkTrends. I've posted some of those findings previously (here, here, and here). If you want to go directly to the source, click here. Sadly, the blog hasn't been updated in over a year.
Jenn alerted me to some findings regarding members' misrepresentations of themselves. This ties in nicely with what was discussed in class this week. The first attribute they discuss is height.
Here's an excerpt from beginning on the post:
The Big Lies People Tell In Online Dating
[...]
Anyhow, in many online situations, self-misrepresentation is totally harmless. Like, who cares if your Halo 3 avatar is taller than you are in real life? Or if flickr thinks you're single when you're really married? But in online dating, where the whole goal is to eventually meet other people in person, creating a false impression is a whole different deal.
People do everything they can in their OkCupid profiles to make themselves seem awesome, and surely many of our users genuinely are. But it's very hard for the casual browser to tell truth from fiction. With our behind-the-scenes perspective, we're able to shed some light on some typical claims and the likely realities behind them.
Let's get started.
"I'm 6 feet tall."
REALITY: People are two inches shorter in real life.
This whole post was inspired by an amusing graph we stumbled across while trying to answer the question Do taller guys have more sex? The answer, to a degree, is yes, and I'll expand on that in a little bit. But in this case what was more interesting than the sex was the (supposed) tallness of the guys.
The male heights on OkCupid very nearly follow the expected normal distribution—except the whole thing is shifted to the right of where it should be. You can see it better when we overlay the implied best fit below (pardon the technical language):
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Almost universally guys like to add a couple inches. You can also see a more subtle vanity at work: starting at roughly 5' 8", the top of the dotted curve tilts even further rightward. This means that guys as they get closer to six feet round up a bit more than usual, stretching for that coveted psychological benchmark.
Women show a similar pattern. Go read the rest, including data about finances and attractiveness, here. This graph, in particular, is very telling:
