This isn’t a matter of small sample sizes data from those three sites is drawn from 30 million people. He found that these percentages stayed true across the board.

Rudder compared his OkCupid data to stats from other sites like and DateHookup. Asian men experience similar stats, though not Asian women. What Rudder is saying is that black users are only 75% as likely as white or Latino users to get positive feedback from other people on the site. They get replied to about three quarters of the time. They’re attractiveness rating are three quarters of an average white user, or Latino user for that matter. On a piece of paper OkCupid should be a very progressive place… But the data that we have, you know, black users get three quarters of the messages, the positive votes. Rudder also takes note of implicit racial biases among OkCupid users, all in spite of the site’s politically progressive demographics: Your personality takes over after the fourth message.” “ You also see that once people start talking and they establish a rapport, which for OkCupid is four messages going back-and-forth, that attractiveness kind of goes out the window at that point. “You see that men are the kind of pursuers in relationships at a four to one ratio and kind of correspondingly, women, because they’re getting four messages to every one they send out, like they respond a lot less and response rates track directly with how hot the writer was, is.”īeneath the surface though, there are some surprising behavioral trends revealed through Rudder’s unique access to data such as message length, time spent composing messages, and message response rates:

Several of Rudder’s initial observations appear to substantiate commonly held perceptions of heterosexual dating:

Dataclysm by christian rudder