Game Theory in Dating
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-mathematics-of-beauty/
OKCupid is a free online dating website. Because it is a popular site, they have access to lots of data about lots of people (there are 7 million active members). Everyone who makes a profile answers certain questions about themselves, to help the site better match them with someone else. Luckily for us, the people who run the site are kind of geeks, so they have taken this massive data set and crunched lots of numbers. The result is a blog called OkTrends.
The post at http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-mathematics-of-beauty/ is about what kind of profile men are most likely to message. It turns out that attractiveness is not the best indicator – instead disagreement about attractiveness is. For example, if two girls are considered 7/10, but one is judged as a 7 by everyone, and the other is divisive with some 8’s and 10’s and some 1’s and 5’s, the second girl will receive much more interest from men. In fact, OkCupid was able to make a formula to predict how many messages a girl would receive based on how attractive people found her, and the results are interesting. On a 5 point scale of attractiveness, 1’s and 5’s increase the number. So if M1 is an attractiveness rating on the low end, and M5 is the highest, they say that
messages= .4M1-.5M2-.1M4+.9M5+k
where k is some constant.
This is an example of game theory. Women that have an unappealing feature – something that some men find unattractive – get more messages from men. Someone who is conventionally attractive gets fewer. OkCupid thinks that this is because, whether subconsciously or not, men think they will be more successful with someone that other men may find unattractive, and less successful with someone who is conventionally ‘pretty’. Girls who have tattoos, piercings, or are overweight seem like they would get fewer messages, making it appear to be a strategic choice to message them (in reality the opposite is true). The strategy is to message people where there is perceived to be less competition, making a message seem like it will have a better chance of success. This behavior is widespread and consistent through their millions of users, so it is definitely a factor in the way people behave. It is interesting that who we choose to pursue conforms to game strategy. We go after the person we find to meet a certain standard, that we feel would not meet that standard for other people. That a website was able to not only graph this behavior, but quantify it with a formula that was accurate at predicting the number of messages sent, is really cool and has a lot of implications regarding human behavior and what factors we base our actions on.