It would be amusing to just have a contest asking people to guess what the vertical axis on this chart is supposed to represent.
The answer is, “reply rate to first-contact messages on an online dating site, as a function of words appearing in the message.” In particular, the site OkCupid, which has a handy rundown of which words and phrases are most likely to garner a reply to an initial contact. (Via FlowingData.) The average response rate is 32%, so you can see how using some specific word increases or decreases your chances of success. Apparently mentioning “God” is a big turn-off, although calling Him by a proper name is slightly helpful. But nothing works at turning a stranger’s head quite like bringing up His complete lack of existence.
Other useful hints: real words good, fake internet words bad. Complimenting personality/intellect good, complimenting looks bad. Being specific is good, especially if it involves physics, heavy metal, vegetarianism, or zombies. Hey, I’m just the messenger here.
This study makes a lot more sense when you understand that, as far as dating sites go, OKCupid is kind of, well… weird. I think everybody I know who’s been on it (myself included) has some relatively bizarre story to tell about it. That its userbase is self-selective towards skeptics does not surprise me in the slightest.
Given that marriage plays a big role in the religious communities cited, and therefore people get married more frequently and stay married with more determination (!) than atheists, there is a cultural selection bias in the people who use such a site….
Which is not to say that atheists are unhappy: using dating sites has grown out of being a niche market for the desperate.
I’m a member of OKCupid, and the site does have a very particular set of users. From my experience, the number of atheist, skeptic, GLBT, polyamourous, vegan, general outlier on graph of “normal” society is quite high in comparison to other dating sites. Which, since I’m a bisexual, atheist, skeptic, poly lady, is also why I’m a member of their site to begin with…
Maybe atheism works for an initial contact in two ways
1) The Contactee is atheist as well…
2) The Contactee is not atheist, but fells the need to
a) combat the evil of atheism and reply
b) probe further into this way of life to understand how it is the opposite of their own way of life guided by G-d, and yet its adherents are happy?!?
Why is it better to date an atheist? Well, that’s easy. Imagine it is Sunday, 9:30am.
Christian spouse: honey, wake up, shave, shower, have breakfast, and put on your nice clothes, all within the next hour. We need to go to church!
vs.
Atheist spouse: let’s sleep for a bit more. Then we can frolick in bed for a bit before going somewhere nice for brunch.
‘Nuff said.
Anyone for science?
The problem is that some persons on this kind of sites are making their selections with some limits seized by informatics and without a real knowledge of what is important in order to decide these limits, for age for example, but afterwards some think they do have to respect their choice even if it is not good ; what is a problem relatively to what is happening in a usual contact (where it is not possible to be so precise). On an other side it is a good way to find the persons who are really looking for somebody even if they are not living very close to us.
This is the third unrelated site I’ve seen this on, aside from when it was originally posted on OKC, where I’ve been a member for quite a long time. The site definitely attracts alt-lifestylers and geeks, so while the data might not be representative of society as a whole, it’s definitely an interesting look at the crossing grounds of various social groups.
I can propose a mechanism : atheists don’t meet potential romantic partners at church….
(After all, church is where I met my wife!)
Possibly it’s not because of the words, but because of the characteristics correlated with people who would use these words? It’s hard to extract something like writing style and intelligence by using a computer program but I think there’s a well documented correlation between atheism and education.
yeah, correlated with the kind of education you get these days
instead of learning something about history – oh but they are busy
rewriting history.
Previously I knew zero about OKCupid, but it appears highly likely, given what’s said above, that selection bias is entirely sufficient to explain the trend. See, I’m a sexy skeptical atheist type, and I’m really turned on by Occam’s big long razor.
JJ, Candice, etc: The idea that atheist relationships are less stable, or that religious marriages are stronger is directly against the data. Atheists have the lowest divorce rate of any ‘religious’ group:
from http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm
Religion % have been divorced
Jews 30%
Born-again Christians 27%
Other Christians 24%
Atheists, Agnostics 21%
As for atheists being easy? I have my doubts. Most of us seem to suffer from being generally impossible.
Thanks Spiv. I was going to point out that more religious people get divorced. Probably has something to do with the fact that for them, marriage means mindless conformity to an age-old tradition, and actual love or compatibility comes second.
Besides, we all know the easiest girls are the ones who were raised with abstinence-only education (also the likeliest to accidentally get pregnant, especially as teens).
I am an atheist and 100% monogamous. I would suspect atheists are more popular because we THINK.
Hey, I work for OkCupid (I’m the CTO), and did a lot of the analysis that went into that blog post. Thanks for the link to our blog article! Since there were a few questions about sample sizes and such I thought I’d post some info on the methodology.
Since that article was written for a general audience, it doesn’t talk a lot about the math or other details, and the explanations are a bit simplified. Firstly, even though we talk about “how many messages a word appears in”, we actually weighted words by the inverse of how many different people a given sender contacted, to prevent results from being skewed by people who copied and pasted the same message to lots of people. We also discarded words that didn’t appear in hundreds of messages from different people, and ones where the deviation from mean wasn’t enough for a 99.5% confidence level.
It’s true that we’re smaller than match.com (for now :)), OkCupid has a lot more member than many people realize… over a million only counting still users who have active accounts and log in regularly, so sample sizes are not really an issue for most kinds of analysis. Moreover, it isn’t really the niche it used to be a few years ago, with growing numbers of people in all demographics. Of course, it’ll never be a uniform sample over the entire population, so what applies to OkCupid may not always apply to, say, eHarmony.
I will get my OBE (over bloody eighty) next year, so I have had a lot of time to ponder and my aethiest views have not altered since the age of 16 – at a c of e boarding school. God, heaven etc is a wonderful fantasy but that is all it is – where is the evidence ?
Vinay, thanks for chiming in. Folks around here do enjoy their mathematical details sometimes.
this probably says more about the self selecting sample of online daters than the religious preferences of daters in america
but that would detract from you baiting and illogical message
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Vinay, what are the figures for ‘millionaire’, ‘yacht’ and ‘three wolf moon t-shirt’?
Sean;
I believe you have it wrong!
Living 34 years of my life in Iraq, I know Muslim would top the chart. They are behind here due to sampling error here.
Of course, theists will ignore this evidence and will keep mentioning God in their first-contact messages.
I tried OKCupid and do find a healthy skepticism sexy, but all the women in my area put their religion front and center, which scared me away from the site entirely.
“…married more frequently and stay married with more determination (!) than atheists…”
Actually, Caralune, divorce rates among Christians are higher than atheists, but thanks for showing your ignorance.
As are abortion rates.