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Welcome back, dorks. We&8217ve processed the messaging habits of over a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might&8217ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well. It would be awesome if other big websites would go out on a limb and release their own race data, too. I can&8217t imagine they will: multi-million dollar enterprises rarely like to admit that the people generating those millions act like turds. But being poor gives us a certain freedom. To alienate all our users. So there.

When I first started looking at first-contact attempts and who was writing who back, it was immediately obvious that the sender&8217s race was a huge factor. Here are just a handful of the numbers that illustrate that:

. . .First of all, how do we know that race shouldn&8217t matter? Are we just making some after-school-special assumption that &8220true love is colorblind?&8221

means more repliesNo, we&8217re not: we know race shouldn&8217t matter to replies because the races all match each other more or less evenly, andreply rate correlates to matching. That is, more compatibility generally means more replies.

On OkCupid you create your own unique matching system, and that means your better matches are people you actually want talk to. Below is a graph showing match percentages vs. reply rates for a random sample of 500,000 people.As you can see, in general, the better you match someone, the more likely you are to reply to a first message from them.

We can see this principle in action when we look at our trusty control, the Zodiac. Here are the match and reply rates side-by-side, with similar rates colored yellow. There&8217s no real need to inspect the numbers just observe the similar colors.

Throughout this post, yellowish colors are short-hand for &8220neutral&8221 andandindicate &8220strong preference.&8221

People of the various Zodiac signs match each other all at roughly the average rate, and, as we would expect, theyreply to messagessimilarly. In general, the correlation between match percentage and reply rate means that whenever we compare the match/reply charts for a given breakdown of the population, they should look about the same. However, this, like so many other fine assumptions, totally breaks down when race gets involved:

Again, don&8217t bother squinting, just check out the colors. We&8217ll soon look very closely at these tables.

. . .So here&8217s last week&8217s compatibility by race table (I explained how we can confidently measure &8220compatibility&8221 inthat post). This is a blow-up of the leftmost table above:

As you can see, the races all match each other roughly evenly: good news. It means all other things being equal, two people, of whatever race, should have the same chance to have a successful relationshp. But now let&8217s look at the table of how individuals actually reply to each other&8217s messages. First we&8217ll examine messages sent by men to women (I know our gay readers are interested in same-sex versions of these tables, there&8217s a link to themhereand at the end of this post):

The numbers on the perimeter of the table are thefor each column/row. Here&8217s what we can know:

Whether it&8217s due to talkativeness, loneliness, or a sense of plain decency, black women are by far the most likely to respond to a first contact attempt. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and, overall, black women reply about a quarter more often that other women.

Whatever it is, white males just get more replies from almost every group. We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, we did likewise with height.

These three types of womenonlyrespond well to white men. More significantly, these groups&8217 reply rates tonon-whitesis terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at, Hispanic women at, and white women at. It&8217s here where things get interesting, for white women in particular. If you look at thematch-by-racetable before this one, the &8220should-look-like&8221 one, you see that white women have an above-average compatibility with almost every group. Yet they only reply well to guys who look like them. There&8217s more data on this towards the end of the post.

Or rather,美容 they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every raceincluding other blackssingles them out for the cold shoulder.

The average reply rate ofnon-whitemales is, while white guys&8217 is only. Basically, they write back about 20% less often. It&8217s ironic that white guys are worst responders, because as we saw above they in turn get the most replies. That has apparently made them very self-absorbed.

. . .Finally, here are a couple tables that shed further light on our discussion. These are site-wide answers to a couple user-written match questions. They barely need any explanation: one comments on the other, really. Together they shed more light on the theory/practice schizophrenia of people&8217s racial attitudes.

. . .It&8217s surely not just OkCupid users that are like this. In fact, it&8217s any dating site (and indeed any collection of people) would likely exhibit messaging biases similar to what I&8217ve written up.

has these biasesAccording to our internal metrics, at least, OkCupid&8217s users are better-educated, younger, and far more progressive than the norm, so I can imagine that many sites would actually haveworserace stats. But like I said at the beginning, we&8217ll probably never know. See you next week.

For a further discussion of race and replies, the same-sex equivalents of this post&8217s dataare here.

So what if Whites are most preferred? This isn&8217t some popularity contest. Anyone who blames race or color for not being able to find love is pathetic.

&8220So what if Whites are most preferred? This isnt some popularity contest.&8221

Actually, this is science

&8221 Anyone who blames race or color for not being able to find love is pathetic.&8221

True, but to ignore the fact that race plays a big role in initial attraction is ignorant.

smh&8230.

I could write a fucking library about why this is and why it happened and why its fucked up, but what we can take away from this is. The white media has ruined all the other races. Everyone who isn&8217t white hates themselves and everyone has been taught to worship white. This is very, very, VERY sad and disheartening. Major props to the Black women out there because y&8217all can&8217t seem to catch a break&8230

lol at all the racist. get over it white women don&8217t have to date/fuck you.

if that makes them racist, so what! there is nothing you can do about it.

that is the way of the world.

Just looking at the last chart, the population numbers would be a much more interesting comparison than percentages. Whites, both male and female, vastly outnumber the other races that responded to that question. I would posit that the vast differences in populations could skew the responses in some way, be it positively or negatively. Perhaps they should put forth charts with the true numbers next to the percentages? I think there are some holes/further ideas that need to be explored before definitive answers and judgements can be made.

As a Canadian born Asian woman&8230.I have no attraction to other Asian men and honestly, prefer white males. Why? I think it&8217s cultural difference &8211 being Canadian born, English is my first language and I&8217ve grown up very liberal. All the Asian men I&8217ve met are not liberal. They&8217re conservative and they&8217re looking for a house wife to pump out children. Not me. No way. I find it&8217s easier for me to be in a relationship with a white male because there&8217s less pressure of being forced to get married, of meeting family, etc, which I don&8217t want! In the past, I actually was attracted to Asian men more than white men in the past but after getting to know them and realizing their interests don&8217t lie with mine&8230shrugs And I find that Asian men are just too effeminate, more effeminate than I am sometimes! I&8217m a very tough chick and I want a man who can handle my crass humour and open-mindedness. Just my two cents&8230

OkTrends is original research and insights fromOkCupid. Weve compiled our observations and statistics from hundreds of millions of OkCupid user interactions, all to explore the data side of the online dating world. You can read a bit moreabout us here.

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