What is it that makes a culture unique? How are whites, blacks, Asians, or whoever different from everybody else? What tastes, interests, and concepts define an ethnic group? And is there any way to make fun of other races in public and get away with it?
These are big questions, and here’s how OkCupid answered them.
They selected 526,000 OkCupid users at random and divided them into groups by their (self-stated) race. They then took all these people’s profile essays (280 million words in total!) and isolated the words and phrases that made each racial group’s essays statistically distinct from the others’.
For instance, it turns out that all kinds of people list sushi as one of their favorite foods. But Asians are the only group who also list sashimi; it’s a racial outlier. Similarly, as you’ll see, black people are 20 times more likely than everyone else to mention soul food, whereas no foods are distinct for white people, unless you count Diet Coke.
Using this kind of analysis, OkCupid was able to find the interests, hobbies, tastes, and self-descriptions that are especially important to each racial group, as determined by the words of the group itself. The information in this article is not their opinion—it’s data, aggregated from the essays of half a million real people.
Stuff White People Like
For white men, the list includes things like Tom Clancy, Van Halen, golfing, Harley Davidson, Ghostbusters, Phish, The Big Lebowski, boating, hockey, and grilling. In short: sweaty guitar rock, bro-on-bro comedies, engines, and dystopias.
As for the interests of white women, they’ve got romance novels, some country music, and a selection of Good Housekeeping-type stuff. There’s a strong pastoral theme with things like bonfires, boating, horseback riding, and thunderstorms. It’s funny that OkCupid’s user base is almost all in large cities—where if you’re doing much of this stuff, civilization has probably ended.
If you had to sum it up: for white men, think “frat house,” and for white women, “escapism.”
Stuff Black People Like
For black men and women, soul food is a huge theme, but especially so for black women. It’s the single strongest phrase/group pair OkCupid found.
Religious expressions like God-fearing and mentions of the Bible are common too, especially for black men and women. Black people are more than twice as likely as average to mention faith in their profiles. In fact, 13 of the top 50 phrases for black women are religious in nature.
Also interesting: black women’s lists explicitly include people from other races (Justin Timberlake makes an appearance). And for black men, I am cool is the second most typical phrase. Bold, right?
Stuff Latinos Like
Music and dancing—merengue, bachata, reggaeton, salsa—are obviously very important to Latinos of both genders. The men have two other fascinating things going on: an interest in telling you about their sense of humor (i'm a funny guy, very funny, outgoing and funny, etc.) and an interest in industrial strength ass-kicking (mma, ufc, boxing, marines, etc.) Basically, if a Latin dude tells you a joke, you should laugh.
Latinas' interests are fairly typical for a dating site: you got friends, career, education, movies, music, a few physical details, and, oh yeah...morbid fear. We dug further into I'm terrified of (on their list at #42) and found which words typically came next. It's mostly insects and "the dark", though one expert tautologist is "terrified of being scared" and another woman is "terrified of Martians."
Stuff Asians Like
As you can see, both Asian men and women choose I'm simple as their go-to self-description. Contrast this to black men's I am cool and Latinos' I'm a funny guy. It's also interesting that Asian men very often mention their specific heritage (Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, China) while Asian women don't.
Sidenote: Reading Level
Since OkCupid was already analyzing the text of profiles, they decided to assess the reading level of different racial groups using the Coleman-Liau Index. The results showed some interesting patterns.
While certain racial groups scored higher than others, OkCupid also found that when analyzing profiles by religion, those who were “very serious” about their faith wrote at a lower reading level.
Conversely, people who were serious about not having faith—like “very serious” agnostics and atheists—scored the highest.
This is part of a series of blog posts that analyzes OkCupid's online-dating statistics. You can find the others here: