Thursday, February 11, The new book The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance, dives into the ways racism is deeply embedded in online dating sites, Source: A recent post by Jenny Davis over at the Pacific Standard suggests that “ Online dating shows us the cold, hard facts about race in America “. In her article, Jenny discusses some Online dating platforms can be more strategic when designing their filters, matching algorithms and guidelines to make it harder for users to act on their subconscious racial biases, and to
What Does Online Dating Tell Us About Racial Views? | Psychology Today
Preferences can be funny things, or at least our judgments of them. In her article, Jenny discusses some data released from a Facebook-based dating app that figures out which people are interested in which other people on some sexual or romantic level.
As anyone can clearly see, there are favorites. When it comes to the highest positive response rate, most women, regardless of their race, appear to favor white men, whereas most men, again, regardless of their race, tend to favor Asian women.
In terms of the lowest response rate, women appeared to shun black men, whereas men tended to shun black women, online dating racism. Well, sort of, anyway; if she were being online dating racism and who is?
Strangely, she does not. One can only guess as to why she does not, because Jenny makes no apparent attempt to understand the data in question.
By that, I mean that Jenny offers no potential alternative explanations through which we might understand the data. I would like to try and pick up some of that explanatory slack. Despite initial appearances, it is possible that this data has very little, if anything, to do with race per se. To see why I would say this only requires that one understands a very basic statistical concept: correlation does not equal causation.
This is something that I imagine Jenny understands, but it likely slipped her mind in the midst of trying to make a point. There are few examples to consider, but the first is by far the simplest. Most men, if you polled them, would overwhelming respond to women on dating websites, and not other men; women would likely do the reserve.
But maybe we do devalue certain racial groups, online dating racism, at least when it comes to dating them. This brings us to the second issue: mating decisions are often complex. There are dozens of potential variables that people assess online dating racism choosing a mate—such as how much money they have, how much they weigh, online dating racism, how tall they are, their age, their relatedness to us, etc.
The important point here is that even if people are picking mates on the basis of these other characteristics alone and not race online dating racism, we online dating racism still see racial differences in outcomes.
If that were the case, provided there are any average differences in height among the races, we would still see different response rates to and from each racial group, even though no one was selecting on the basis of race. If other people pick up on online dating racism factors primarily, then race itself might not be the primary, or even a, online dating racism, factor driving these decisions.
In fact, in terms of response rates, there was a consistent overall pattern: from lowest to highest, it tended to be Latinos, Whites, Asians, and Blacks, regardless of sex with only a single exception. Whatever the reasons for this, I would guess that it shows up in other ways in the profiles of these senders and responders, online dating racism.
However, to determine the extent to which it uniquely predicts anything, you need to control for other relevant factors. Does obesity play a role in these decisions? Is obesity equally common across racial groups? How about income; does income matter? In some cases it sure seems to. Is income the same across racial groups? We would likely find the same for many, many other factors.
In addition to determining the extent of how much race matters, one might also wish to explain why race might matter. There appears to be a lot more online dating racism goes into mating decisions than people typically appreciate or even recognize. Jesse Marczyk, Ph. But who we end up becoming and how much we like that person are more in our online dating racism than we tend to think they are. Jesse Marczyk Ph. Pop Psych, online dating racism.
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Swipe my race: 'If you're only dating someone for their skin colour, you should consider why'
, time: 5:50How Racist Is Online Dating? | Popular Science
Thursday, February 11, The new book The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance, dives into the ways racism is deeply embedded in online dating sites, Online dating platforms can be more strategic when designing their filters, matching algorithms and guidelines to make it harder for users to act on their subconscious racial biases, and to Though the rate of interracial marriages in the U.S. has doubled in the past 30 years, according to online dating habits, we’re still pretty racist. Surprise! But. A new study of racism in
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