Comments on: Profile Picture Experiment

By: Jack

Jack — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 22:48:31 +0000

Okay, I’m with “that guy,” as far as the average women and bites… But what about these women that say, “I’m sick of the guys I meet in the bars, etc.” that are GORGEOUS! I know that many of them must be fake (the very obvious professional photography is one clue) but some of them are real, right? And while they might not be exactly what they look like, they are going to be somewhat atractive. Why are they still on the website?

By: that GUY!!

that GUY!! — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 03:01:43 +0000

women join dating sites because they are desperate, or realize that they are getting no “bites” in the real world.

interestingly, once online, they find that they are bombarded by interested men and begin to get an artificial ego boost. where as in the real world she’s lucky if a guy looks at her, or pumps and dumps her, online she’s a queen and has the pick of the litter!

subsequently she begins to get a unrealistic assessment of her attractiveness, and desirableness.

By: PlentyofFish Gets Serious with Paid Memberships

PlentyofFish Gets Serious with Paid Memberships — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 20:14:27 +0000

[...] or two of the premium membership being instigated, I’ll conduct some research similar to the profile picture experiment except trying to quantify the attraction levels of “Serious” POF [...]

By: Plenty of Fish Serious Member Effectiveness

Plenty of Fish Serious Member Effectiveness — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 20:10:19 +0000

[...] and the median of each gender. Also, for comparison purposes, I took an old set of data from my Profile Picture experiment, and found the same [...]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:32:51 +0000

The most interesting part of this is the fact that women get MUCH more attention then men do on this (and every other) site.

Then again, any guy's who's tried online dating knows that.

I recently read an article claiming that more 9 out of every 10 e-mails that are sent on these website are sent by men.

The men make an effort while the women ignore them .

Why the women even bother to join baffles me.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:28:00 +0000

You would expect that the "picture quality" of pictures for males to have a positive effect. Mostly that translate to level of effort which women like to see.

Discounting the males who are classically handsome, (appeals to a larger range of women), the advantage of multiple pictures is to hopefully "catch" a specific look/feature that various women may find attractive.

There are, of course only so many looks that any one person can portray ... I suspect 3-5 pictures should suffice. The straight line effect you're seeing is more likely to one possibility that you mentioned ... better looking people are more likely to post more pictures. As well, males posting many pictures are more likely to pay attention to picture quality.

From the female side I would suspect the number of pictures to have little effect. She is either "attractive enough or not". Women have far more attraction cues than men, in terms of what's attractive to the opposite sex AND men generally only need to see a few attraction cues to create an interest.

I think what you're picking up on in your experiment is, women see men as attractive defined by what they do and who they are rather than just physical appearance alone.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:38:00 +0000

the female “favorite” data is sort of like the homecoming queen/prettiest girl phenomena…just like in high school, men tend to assess attractiveness in the opposite sex as much according to their own proclivities as to those of their peers–which can be largely influenced by the opinions of their peers (and so on, and so on…). whereas women may ADORE sarah jessica parker or find jude law iuber-sexy, most men find SJP assymetrical, opting instead for the cosmetically-enhanced impossibility of a pamela anderson. and, if pressed, would unanimously concur that george clooney is the sexiest man alive.

By: Matt Savage

Matt Savage — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 08:07:00 +0000

@Samuel Agboola,
Yea, having lots of different content displayed in multiple images is a big one. It's like that saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words." So, if one picture is worth a thousand than 8 pictures would be worth 8 thousand words, you can't beat that!

@Julia,
Good point, I'll have to go back and look at the medians for each picture grouping and re-do the graph.

By: Julia

Julia — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:16:00 +0000

The data look like they aren’t normally distributed, especially among women. Using the median instead of the mean, or log-transforming the data, might help with the skewedness and tone down the swings in the women’s graph.

By: Samuel Agboola

Samuel Agboola — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:57:00 +0000

I’d say the swings in the women’s graph are irrelevant. You’re dealing with a small number of data points (8) so little spikes are just noise. The trend is pretty clear.

I agree that better looking people are more likely to post more photos. I’d also suggest that as people who post multiple photos often post different looks, or situations, there’s content in multiple images which isn’t in single photos. That’s going to make it more likely those people are favorites, you know more about them (as they say in movies, show – don’t tell).