OKtrends is the blog ok the OK Cupid dating website. They’ve had two interesting posting recently, Your Looks and Your Inbox and The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures .
The former was quite good, it tells you that attractive women get more messages than less attractive ladies do, but there is a fall off for the most attractive. In fact, “2/3 of male messages go to the top 1/3 of women.” We also learn that “…women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable.” So women constantly think they are asettling over looks, even though in expectation they are not.
The second was not so good. It looks at three attributes,
- Facial Attitude. Is the person smiling? Staring straight ahead? Doing that flirty lip-pursing thing?
- Photo Context. Is there alcohol? Is there a pet? Is the photo outdoors? Is it in a bedroom?
- Skin. How much skin is the person showing? How much face? How much breasts? How much ripped abs?
This analysis is interesting, but it provides no or little advice on how you should change your facial attitude, photo context, or skin amount because of the Lucas critique. All we see is the equilibrium result, but selection effects suggest that the average difference between groups is much larger than the true treatment effect of changing one of these factors. That is, most people who show abs have good abs, that most girls with a cleavage shot show a nice pair, that people with cute dogs are far more likely to pose with them and so on. But that isn’t to say that adding these things to people who lack them will help. That’s what makes them useful signals, they show things about you that are more costly to fake than show sincerely.
To give actual good advice they need to go in and pay a few randomly selected people to change their profiles to have less smiles, a shirtless picture, and so on. Then we’d know what the treatment effect of these changes are and if these changes are good advice.
