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Attraction survey results and comments
Nov. 11th, 2007 12:20 amI finally got around to compiling the data from the attraction survey I did a few weeks back, and to generating some statistics from them.
In the end, I got 21 usable responses, 6 male, 15 female. Not as many males as I would have liked, but there you go. Once the values were averaged, for both males and females the mean averages were matching quite closely to the median averages, which is good as it indicates a reasonable spread of responses.
Overall results
Male, % of eligible people considered attractive, on average: 47.19%
Female, % of eligible people considered attractive, on average: 29.56%
Overall, % of eligible people considered attractive, on average: 34.6%
This is interesting as it seems to fit the commonly received wisdom, that males are interested in a wide array of potential mates, and it's females who are more picky. Whether this is cultural (eg. men expected to make the moves, women expected to conceal interest) or biological (women have more to lose - as a result of getting pregnant - and therefore need to be more discerning) is the interesting question. Apart from general stat-gathering for interest's sake, I was hoping to see that this gender difference effect would not be present in an anonymous study, as I presumed the bias was mostly cultural and would therefore evaporate when the respondent is not at risk of being judged by their peers. Assuming the stats are valid, either I was wrong, or such cultural effects end up becoming ingrained to the point where they become part of automatic behaviour.
The actual statistical significance of this difference, according to the Mann-Whitney U test, was P=0.086, which is roughly saying there's an 8.6% probability that such a result would come from chance alone. It's not bad, but not conclusive either. You'd hope for something nearer 5% or lower for a decent study, but oh well. It's not my fault so few of you replied. ;)
The numbers can't used in the intuitive way, however. A male may take one of the 47.19% of their female friends they find attractive, and assume they have a 29.56% chance of this interest being reciprocated. This would only work if attraction happened in isolation, where the 2 people had no mutual interaction. However, various studies seem to indicate that the simple act of someone else finding you attractive makes you find them more attractive. (eg. This recent one.) This, along with the matching hypothesis, seem to suggest a natural inclination to minimise effort spent on finding a partner by being drawn to those that are likely to reciprocate. Thus, if these things are true, the 47.19% and 29.56% scores are probably underestimates, when trying to gauge how lucky you're going to be with someone you're interested in. Similarly, they are probably overestimates when guessing how many people you're not interested in are wasting their attentions on you. ;)
Other interesting observations:
Problems:
So, yeah. That's it. Questions or comments?
In the end, I got 21 usable responses, 6 male, 15 female. Not as many males as I would have liked, but there you go. Once the values were averaged, for both males and females the mean averages were matching quite closely to the median averages, which is good as it indicates a reasonable spread of responses.
Overall results
Male, % of eligible people considered attractive, on average: 47.19%
Female, % of eligible people considered attractive, on average: 29.56%
Overall, % of eligible people considered attractive, on average: 34.6%
This is interesting as it seems to fit the commonly received wisdom, that males are interested in a wide array of potential mates, and it's females who are more picky. Whether this is cultural (eg. men expected to make the moves, women expected to conceal interest) or biological (women have more to lose - as a result of getting pregnant - and therefore need to be more discerning) is the interesting question. Apart from general stat-gathering for interest's sake, I was hoping to see that this gender difference effect would not be present in an anonymous study, as I presumed the bias was mostly cultural and would therefore evaporate when the respondent is not at risk of being judged by their peers. Assuming the stats are valid, either I was wrong, or such cultural effects end up becoming ingrained to the point where they become part of automatic behaviour.
The actual statistical significance of this difference, according to the Mann-Whitney U test, was P=0.086, which is roughly saying there's an 8.6% probability that such a result would come from chance alone. It's not bad, but not conclusive either. You'd hope for something nearer 5% or lower for a decent study, but oh well. It's not my fault so few of you replied. ;)
The numbers can't used in the intuitive way, however. A male may take one of the 47.19% of their female friends they find attractive, and assume they have a 29.56% chance of this interest being reciprocated. This would only work if attraction happened in isolation, where the 2 people had no mutual interaction. However, various studies seem to indicate that the simple act of someone else finding you attractive makes you find them more attractive. (eg. This recent one.) This, along with the matching hypothesis, seem to suggest a natural inclination to minimise effort spent on finding a partner by being drawn to those that are likely to reciprocate. Thus, if these things are true, the 47.19% and 29.56% scores are probably underestimates, when trying to gauge how lucky you're going to be with someone you're interested in. Similarly, they are probably overestimates when guessing how many people you're not interested in are wasting their attentions on you. ;)
Other interesting observations:
- Out of the 21 samples, the top three (ie. people who were attracted to the largest proportion of their friends) were all male;
- Out of the 21 samples, the bottom three (ie. people who were attracted to the smallest proportion of their friends) were all female;
- Females who explicitly reported themselves as straight were attracted to 18.12% of their eligible friends, while those who identified as bisexual averaged a somewhat higher 34.4%. One of the latter group commented on there being a distinct difference between how they viewed their eligible males and their eligible females. Another in that group reported separate male and female stats, and showed a clear preference for females.
- Only 4 people supplied Facebook data in addition to their LiveJournal data, but all of those were attracted to a higher proportion of their Facebook friends than their Livejournal friends. My hypothesis here would be that LiveJournal is primarily a written medium, and therefore friendships are more likely to form around conversation and informational content, facilitating non-romantic acquaintances, whereas on Facebook there is a larger visual component and perhaps a tendency to seek out and select attractive friends.
- Only 3 people supplied MySpace data in addition to their LiveJournal data, and again each proportion scored higher than that person's LJ friends. 2 of the 3 scored higher than their Facebook scores did. This fits with the above hypothesis, if one accepts that MySpace is even more of a visual and less of a verbal medium than Facebook. The third person, who didn't fit that trend, commented that their MySpace page is used for a lot of work-related networking, as opposed to personal friendships, which may have skewed their scores downwards.
Problems:
- I had no gay male, bi male, or lesbian female respondents, or at least none that claimed as such. Their distributions may be quite different. I have some lesbians reading this LJ, but they're not contributing. Oh well. :)
- Some people had trouble knowing what was being measured. I tried to make it clear by noting romantic and physical attraction as the 2 potential 'boxes' to put someone in, but it is complicated by temporal factors (eg. someone you used to be interested in, but no longer, but who you still consider objectively attractive), ambiguity (eg. people you don't know too well, or haven't seen a picture of), and risk assessment (eg. being unsure whether to include those found attractive but who one would would never 'get involved' with for other reasons). I knew a stricter definition would have helped here, but I left it the way it was to avoid an overly complex survey from discouraging potential respondents.
- In some people, current status seems to affect ability to judge. One or two people replied saying they couldn't respond because they are currently in a relationship, finding almost all others unattractive during that. This seems like a useful cultural or biological mechanism for maintaining stable relationships. Again, it would be interesting to collect gender specific information for it - do men look around more than women?
- Most of my LJ friends come from various alternative scenes, ie. gothic/rock/metal/etc, which has a reputation (correct or not) for being more sexually liberal. This might mean the results are a bit more skewed towards promiscuity than you might expect. (Or it might just mean other subcultures feel more repressed in public. Who knows.)
So, yeah. That's it. Questions or comments?
