Tuesday, January 25, 2011

OkTrends: The Mathematics of Beauty


OkTrends - This post investigates female attractiveness, but without the usual photo analysis stuff. Instead, we look past a woman's picture, into the reaction she creates in the reptile mind of the human male. Among the remarkable things [we've shown]:
  • that the more men as a group disagree about a woman's looks, the more they end up liking her
  • guys tend to ignore girls who are merely cute
  • and, in fact, having some men think she's ugly actually works in woman's favor
Now I normally don't buy into these sorts of overarching claims, but this blog in particular has the support of the huge sample size because of the large dating site behind it (OkCupid). So everything here is based upon over 1.5 million votes, nearly 600,000 messages, and 64,000 separate profiles. Plus this article is crazy long and I'm WAY too lazy to construct an argument against this amount of data. I'm an American, not a mathematician.

In the end, they've discovered that if some guys think a girl is a 1 and others think she's a 10, she's going to get a lot more attention than a girl that everyone thinks is say...a 7. Even further, if two girls' looks scored the same (like the girls above), the one who produced the biggest variance is the one who got the most messages (the girl on the left).  You know why?  Cause some dudes like that shit.

It doesn't matter what that shit is.  It could be that you're fat.  Or that you're only 4'10".  Or that you're orange.  Some dudes wanna fuck Snooki!  Whatever it is you got, there are men out there that will eff it.

Check out the rest of that site too if you wanna lose a few hours.  Interesting stuff.

1 comment:

  1. OKCupid's blog is doing the most interesting sociology work out there. Have you seen the one they did on how to take a good picture of yourself?

    I'm enjoying your blog, keep up the good work.

    ReplyDelete