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themathematicsofbeauty.html: “The Mathematics Of Beauty”, (2011-01-10; backlinks):[Today’s dataset: 1.54m votes, 596k messages, 64k profiles.]
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’ll show:
- 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 let’s look back at the two real users from before, this time with their own graphs. OkCupid uses a 1 to 5 star system for rating people, so the rest of our discussion will be in those terms. All the users pictured were generous and confident enough to allow us to dissect their experience on our site, and we appreciate it. Okay, so we have: […] As you can see, though the average attractiveness for the two women above is very close, their vote patterns differ. On the left you have consensus, and on the right you have split opinion.
To put a fine point on it:
- Ms. Left is, in an absolute sense, considered slightly more attractive
- Ms. Right was also given the lowest rating 142% more often
- yet Ms. Right gets 3× as many messages
When we began pairing other people of similar looks and profiles, but different message outcomes, this pattern presented itself again and again. The less-messaged woman was usually considered consistently attractive, while the more-messaged woman often created variation in male opinion…Our first result was to compare the standard deviation of a woman’s votes to the messages she gets. The more men disagree about a woman’s looks, the more they like her. I’ve plotted the deviation vs. messages curve below, again including some examples…
