Online Dating is a Game Theory I wouldn’t want to play
Source: https://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/
It’s no secret that looks (and distance) heavily determine whether or not someone swipes right on your Tinder profile picture, but what of those searching for something more than a one-night fanciful get-together? OkCupid looked to their Dating research team, Oktrends, which specializes in recording information collected from individual and anonymous OkCupid relationship statistics, to find how someone’s profile picture (or, more specifically, how they looked in that profile picture) affected the amount of messages received.
For this, they looked at the data from purely heterosexual interests: men are strictly attracted to women and women are strictly attracted to men. Now, for the data collection, the team first needed to have a general rating of looks. The had individuals rate profile pictures on a 0 to 5 scale and then used the data collected of distribution of attractiveness and superimposed the information in order to gauge the correlation between attractiveness and number of messages received.
Surprisingly, the data showed for Male Messages to Female Attractiveness, the most attractive women did not, on average obtain the most messages. One could speculate that the reason for this is because if the woman is too attractive, the man may become skeptical as to whether or not they were actual real clients, or felt they were too pretty to actually accept their message. Either way, it seems looks are still a large determinant of what makes a man interested—no honest surprise there.
As for Female Messaging and Male Attractiveness, there seems to be a different bias towards how women on OkCupid view looks versus how men do. The curve shows that more of them find most men on OkCupid less attractive. However, even though they find men less attractive, they still present a greater willingness to message those. That also being said, given that so few a percentage hit 3 or above, the amount of messages they garner is quite considerable.
Next, we observe the Message Success by Attractiveness.
Here we see that the most attractive women garner the best responses, which is natural, but what really tips us off is that with the considerably less attractive men, the attractive women are less liable to get a response than from those who have medium attractiveness. Reasons for this could be, due to disbelief, these men could find these attractive women to be spammers, which, is a viable argument of something that’s common on the internet.
Looking at Men, though, there’s an even sharper inclination for less attractive women to do the same as women do. OkCupid cites that they very carefully control for that in their article, and say “It seems to be some kind of self-confidence thing.”
How does this all relate in the grand scope of things? To me, I say this relates heavily to Game Theory. Taking this a bit out of context, think of the amount of likes someone gets for a good profile picture on Facebook, versus one that…could’ve been better. When we look at a picture, we immediately have made a decision in our heads of how to interpret that. That’s the STRATEGY that we set up in Game Theory. Now, what we do with that interpretation, along with several alternating factors determines how we act. If it was a bad picture, we won’t even give them the courtesy of a like.
Now, back to dating. If the picture is too good, what do we do? We ask ourselves “would that person be attracted to me for my assets?” And then we make our choice from there. In this theory, we think of the other person’s chance of accepting us rather than whether or not we’ve accepted them—we look at our envisioned payoff chance. Would that be their dominant choice, to reply back?
Same goes for the responder. If they receive a message, they now have the idea of whether or not someone presents interest, but they must then wonder from the sender’s picture, whether or not the payoff of being with someone with looks rated 0-5 is worth being with. What would the kids look like? Would they really stay interested if they’re that good looking? Is this person actually real? As we can see, this heavily affects decision making and can heavily skew trends we once perceived as obvious. This is just good to note whenever generating a Game Theory schema—what’s going on in each player’s head and can all those thoughts actually lead to a quantifiable payoff?