OkCupid - online dating site or cleverly disguised social experiment?

Personally, I'm leaning towards the latter. Most people know OkCupid as one of the more popular online dating services, but if you check out their blog, it turns out it's run by a group of hardcore statistics geeks who love to take advantage of the enormous amount of data they get from their millions of users.

Here's a link to their most recent article, The Mathematics of Beauty. People rank other OkCupid users on a 1-5 scale (5 being most attractive), but they found some strange data when they plotted attractiveness vs number of messages a person receives on the site:

There's a moderate correlation, but that's some very noisy data, more than you'd expect - women of equal numerical attractiveness are all over the place in terms of how often they get contacted. Not content to stop there, the OkCupid staff dug deeper and started analyzing the distribution of the votes, rather than just the average, and found some very interesting (and surprising) results along the way. In the end, it turns out that women with the most polarizing appearances (lots of 5s and 1s) get messaged the most their theory was that the guys that do find them attractive figure they have a better shot than they do with the women who are universally considered attractive. It ended up being a variation on the classic game theory problem, the Prisoner's Dilemma.

In a particularly ingenious post, they delved into the Exif data of their users' profile photos, finding some pretty significant correlations between the quality of the photos and the rated attractiveness of the photo. For example, it turns out that using the flash consistently adds about 7 years to your age; that is, a photo of a 25 year old using the flash is rated about as attractive as a photo of a 32 year old without flash.

There was also a fairly strong correlation between wide apertures, i.e. one part of the picture in focus against a blurry backdrop, and attractiveness. Compare these extreme examples (the first two have wide apertures, the second ones narrow):

 

(click the images to see them full-size)

Now, it's not necessarily a case of the first two people being more attractive, but their pictures are undeniably more eye-catching and engaging, and certainly make the subjects look better.

It's very much worth reading the original posts and not just my summaries. The OkCupid folks are great writers and are extremely skilled at presenting their data in clear, understandable, and visually appealing ways, so their posts are all a joy to read. In addition, they're not just providing vague conjecture on what people find attractive. Every single statistic they present is drawn directly from the behavior of the millions of people using their site, so it's a much more authentic analysis than some random blogger's personal opinions.

Here are some other interesting posts from them: Gay Sex vs Straight Sex, The REAL 'Stuff White People Like', The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures.