What Online Dating Tells Us About Human Relationships, with Christian Rudder | Big Think

What Online Dating Tells Us About Human Relationships

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Christian Rudder is co-founder of OkCupid and author of the New York Times bestselling book "Dataclysm," in which he harnesses user data collected from dating websites to analyze human behavior. In this video interview Rudder shares examples of OkCupid stats that tell a larger story about why relationships form.

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CHRISTIAN RUDDER:

Christian Rudder is co-founder, general manager and editorial director of OkCupid. Rudder previously worked with fellow Harvard alumni on SparkNotes.com, which Barnes & Noble bought in 2001. He is the author of Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking).

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TRANSCRIPT:

Christian Rudder: I started this whole project by looking at OkCupid and the data and writing the blog that I did, and hopefully will one day do again very soon. And it's the best data set in the world because it's people, all strangers, all making judgments of one another, all probably trying to sleep with each other, which also adds a certain piquancy to the whole thing. So, you know, you look at the data and you really get a kind of special window into people's psyche. Kind of like if you could see everything that was going on in a big bar on a Friday night. And 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.

But then 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. Your personality takes over after the fourth message. You see that in general women's opinions of men's looks, and again on average, is about half of what men's opinions of women's looks are so they kind of get a 50 percent discount just ice cold. On Tinder it's actually a lot more. It's something like a ten percent discount or ninety percent discount sorry the other way. They go at ten. So these environments I think, I can't prove this, my intuition is that the more sexual an environment the larger that discount from women to men.

OkCupid's user base in theory on paper is as liberal as you could ever want it to be. You ask people if they're a Democrat, if they're progressive, yes, yes, yes, you know, two, three to one. We're all highly coastal. Very little red state, very blue. On a piece of paper OkCupid should be a very progressive place. And maybe it is because who knows what the rest of the world is like. But the data that we have, you know, black users get three quarters of the messages, the positive votes. They're attractiveness rating are three quarters of an average white user, or Latino user for that matter. They get replied to about three quarters of the time. It's pretty blanket. Asian men also get a similar discount, but not Asian women.

And then you go and you look at DateHookup, which is a site we run. You look at the data from Match.com and you see the exact same patterns, maybe not in the exact same ratios but the same basic up down yes no patterns when you compare any race with another race. So as suggested it's kind of, I won't say universal in the sense of permanent pattern, but it's certainly like a state of affairs right now in the American psyche. And those three sites alone they registered maybe 30 million people in the United States last year. So it's not like some small sample. I mean that's about half of the single and looking people in the country, to my best guess if you look at the census number. So it's pretty meaningful and a pretty depressing thing to kind of digest.

In so far as like Grindr or any of these other sites that kind of hook up apps are hook up apps for gay men, OkCupid is a little bit more of the relationship site and we have a very strong gay user base, male and female. So we get to look at their patterns and they're basically the same as straight patterns, which I think is meaningful in the context of marriage equality. Because certainly the pre-marriage relationships seem about the same when you actually go and look at the data, which I think is a strong argument for any type of relationship being held apart legally for sure.....

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