Online dating and race at OKCupid

This recent post on the OKCupid blog has been widely linked, but since I covered this previously, at some length (also related), I feel obligated to post it.

If you have any interest in this subject, you'll no doubt read the whole thing, but if you need any further suasion, here are the key figures. Reply rates by race when men send messages...

...and reply rates by race when women send messages...

Read it and weep. (Or rejoice, I suppose, if you're in the favored classes and you guiltlessly enjoy racial privilege.)

BTW yes, they controlled for algorithmic match rate, which is essentially flat across all race/gender combinations (see the "Match % by Race" figure in the original post).

As usual, I find the result itself sad — I think this goes far beyond a moderate amount of understandable homophily (look at the diagonals!) — but what I find much more sad is the degree of self-deception that people engage in when discussing these results. Unfairness is annoying; deception about unfairness really brings on the facepalm.

See, for example, the 459-comment Metafilter thread, where about half the educated, literate, liberal MeFi crowd doesn't seem to get the following simple proposition: although diversity of aesthetic preferences, including preference for racially marked features, may be a simple personal choice, systematic statistical skew in aesthetic preferences across a large population strongly indicates socialization to racially biased standards of attractiveness.

Note, by the way, that racial preferences don't mean merely visual discrimination. The degree of racial discrimination is considerably stronger and more widespread for women than men, even though (as folk wisdom has it) women are less visually focused than men. (Personally, I think folk wisdom overstates this sex difference, but I do think it's real.) I think this implies that part of the racial discrimination effect — possibly even the dominant part — is due to people making assumptions about personality or character based on race, rather than preference for a certain physical appearance alone. Which is even more damning.

Standard caveats w.r.t. all such social science analyses apply blah blah blah. On the other hand, the fact that this result essentially replicates, at finer granularity, the results of the Hitsch et al. study I blogged previously, as well as anecdotal evidence gathered from friends and acquaintances, does not incline me to skepticism.

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