In most online situations, self-misrepresentation is harmless. Like, who cares if your Fortnite avatar is taller than you are in real life? Or if Flickr thinks you're single when you're really married? But in online dating, where the whole goal is to eventually meet other people in person, creating a false impression is a whole different deal.
People do everything they can in their online dating profiles to make themselves seem awesome, and surely many genuinely are. But it’s difficult for a casual user to tell truth from fiction. OkCupid, the top dating site of the late 2000s and early 2010s, took advantage of its massive database of user information to shed some light typical claims and the likely realities behind them. The blogpost where OkCupid shared this analysis published in 2010 and was deleted a few years after that, but Wingman has recovered it, and we’re sharing the findings here.
Let’s get started.
"I'm 6 feet tall."
REALITY: People are two inches shorter in real life.
OkCupid’s entire analysis was inspired by them coming across an amusing chart while trying to answer the question, "Do taller guys have more sex?" The answer, to a degree, is yes, and more on that later. But what stood out was the (supposed) tallness of the guys.
The male heights on OkCupid almost perfectly followed the expected normal distribution—except the whole thing is shifted to the right of where it should be. You can see it better in this overlay with the implied best fit (pardon the technical language):
Almost universally, guys like to add a couple of inches. There's also a more subtle vanity at work: starting at roughly 5' 8", the top of the dotted curve tilts even further rightward. This means that as guys get closer to six feet, they round up a bit more than usual, stretching for that coveted psychological benchmark.
When OkCupid examined the data for women, they were surprised to see that height exaggeration was just as widespread, though without the lurch towards a benchmark height:
On a somewhat humbling note, the writer of the original blog post went back and looked at his own profile and apparently listed himself at 5' 11". Really, he's a touch under 5' 10". Hmmm.
As for whether it even makes sense for people to make such an obvious and easily disproved exaggeration, the jury is out. OkCupid found that taller people, up to a point, have more sex:
But when it comes to receiving messages, shorter women actually seem to get more attention:
These are the average weekly unsolicited message totals by height. You can think of these as the number of times a person is "hit on" out of the blue each week on OkCupid. A 5' 4" woman gets 60 more contacts each year than a six-footer. The genders are plotted on different scales because of the eternal fact that men almost always make the first move, so women get many more unsolicited messages.
It's clear from these charts that women six feet or taller are either less attractive to men or considered too intimidating to message. The data also raises the possibility that these tall women are much more likely to sleep with a man who does approach them. Compare the 6' 0" woman to her 5' 4" counterpart: the taller woman gets hit on about two-thirds as much, yet has had slightly more sex partners.
"I make $100,000 a year."
REALITY: People are 20% poorer than they say they are.
Apparently, an online dater's imagination is the best-performing mutual fund of the last 10 years. Here's what people are saying on OkCupid versus what their incomes should be:
As you can see, people advertise disproportionately high salaries for themselves. Just to pick a symbolic amount, there are consistently 4× the number of people making $100K a year than there should be.
OkCupid was careful in formulating the "expected" lines for each age, adjusting for the platform’s particular demographics: they compared each individual against the average not just by age but by zip code. Here’s a breakdown by gender of the exaggeration rates:
OkCupid also investigated whether a person’s stated income had any real effect on their online dating experience. Unsurprisingly, they found that it matters a lot, particularly for men. This is a by-age messaging distribution:
These bold colors contain a subtle message: if you're a young guy and don't make much money, cool. If you're 23 or older and don’t make much money, good luck. It’s not hard to see where the incentive to exaggerate comes from.
"Here's a recent pic."
REALITY: The more attractive the picture, the more likely it is to be out-of-date.
For example, the above picture was over two years old when it was uploaded. How do they know? Most modern cameras append text tags to the jpgs they take. These tags, called EXIF metadata, specify things like the exposure and f-stop settings, GPS information if your camera has it, and, of course, the time and date the photo was taken. This is how programs like iPhoto know when (and sometimes where) you've taken your pictures.
OkCupid analyzed this data and found that most pictures on the site were of recent vintage; site-wide, the median photo age at upload was just 92 days. However, hotter photos were much more likely to be outdated than normal ones. Here’s a comparison (the age of a picture below is how old it was when it was uploaded to OkCupid):
As you can see, over a third of the hottest photos on the site are a year old or more. And more than twice as many hot photos are over three years old (12%) as average-looking ones (5%), which makes sense because people are more inclined to cling to the pics that make them look their best.
OkCupid also found that older people tend to upload older photos:
The upshot here is, if you see a good-looking picture of a man over 30, that photo is very likely to be out-of-date.
"I'm bisexual."
REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender.
OkCupid is a gay- and bi-friendly platform, and they don't intend to call into question anyone’s sexual identity. However, when they looked into messaging trends by sexuality, they were very surprised by the findings. People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect. Site-wide, here’s how it broke down:
This suggests that bisexuality is often either a hedge for gay people or a label adopted by straights to appear more sexually adventurous to their (straight) matches.
You can actually see these trends in action in the chart below. The swaths of red and blue that you see in these sexuality charts represent people who message only one gender. The purple areas are people who send any messages, in whatever proportion, to both men and women.
In this chart, throughout the teens and twenties, the male bisexual population is mostly observably gay men. By the mid-thirties, it seems, most of these men are more comfortable self-identifying as gay and have left the bi population. By the end of the chart, 3 of every 4 bi males on OkCupid were observably straight. Meanwhile, the proportion of men who message both women and other men holds fairly steady.
The proportions for women were more consistent over time:
12% of women under 35 on OkCupid (and the internet in general, I'd wager) self-identified as bi. However, as you can see above, only about 1 in 4 of those women were actually into both guys and girls at the same time. I know this will come as a big letdown to the straight male browsing population: three-fourths of your fantasies are, in fact, fantasies of a fantasy. Like bi men, most bi women are, for whatever reason, not observably bi.
This is part of a series of blog posts that analyzes OkCupid's online-dating statistics. You can find the others here: