Dollars and Sex (11 page)

Singles compete heavily for very attractive people on dating sites, and this study provides evidence of that; members with the highest “hotness” rating were far more likely to receive requests to meet than were other, less hot, users. For example, increasing a person's attractiveness rating by just 1 point (say from a hotness level of 5 to a hotness level of 6) increased the likelihood that a person viewing that photo wanted to meet by 130 percent. Although male members appear to use a “shotgun” approach (they were 240 percent more likely than female members to click on the “Meet Me” link), you perhaps won't be entirely surprised to learn that men in particular tried to meet women who were far more attractive than they are. Women, on the other hand, appeared to be less concerned about trying to meet men who are more attractive than they are.

On Hot or Not, talk is cheap, literally, since it only requires users to click a free link, but in other environments, pursuing a potential partner is more costly in terms of time and, sometimes, money. Because of those costs, most people prefer to spend as little time searching as possible. The quickest way to find a mate and get off the market is to accurately estimate
our own value on the market—we need to price ourselves appropriately. In order to do that, it is useful to know how we stack up against others with whom we are competing on the market.

IN ONLINE DATING, EVERYONE IS ABOVE AVERAGE

People in general are very biased in terms of their own self-assessment; we are all funnier, smarter, kinder, better looking, and better in bed than the average person. For example, when online dating site users are asked to rate their own appearance, less than 1 percent report their appearance as being “below average.” That assessment wouldn't be that surprising if many other people then reported themselves as being “average,” but only 29 percent of men and 26 percent of women reported that they look “like anyone else walking down the street.” The remaining 68 percent of men and 72 percent of women assessed their own attractiveness as being above average.

Looking at the same Hot or Not study I already mentioned, we find even more evidence of our inability to accurately assess our standing on the market. Hot people on that service are very discriminating as to whom they contact, while people with lower hotness ratings initiate contact with far more people—including others who are rated as being much hotter than themselves.

In fact, the less attractive a member (according to the user ratings), the more they initiated contact with other users and the more willing they were to contact women/men who were hotter than themselves, despite the limited probability that those offers to meet would be accepted.

This may seem like wishful thinking on the part of homely lonely hearts, but not only did less-attractive people seek out users who were more attractive than themselves but they simultaneously ignored users who were rated as being equally attractive. On average, people contacted members who never would have contacted them while, at the same time, not contacting members who would have been open to their invitation to meet.

The results might leave you suspecting that if someone expresses an interest in you on a dating site, then you are probably out of their league. I feel obliged to remind you that this is only true in the statistical sense; on
average you are probably out of the league of most people who would contact you. It does make me think, however, that there is an online dating equivalent to Groucho Marx's famous line: “Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member!”

MONEY CAN BUY YOU LOVE

So, how much do people value physical beauty in online dating? Returning to the metric developed by Ariely, Hitsch, and Hortacsu—the one we discussed when talking about ethnicity—consider a hypothetical woman who can choose between two men: one who is very attractive and one who is not. The first man is in the top 10 percent of all men in terms of appearance (i.e., most people would rate his appearance as at least 9 out of 10) and earns $62,500 a year. The second is in the bottom 10 percent in terms of appearance (i.e., most people would rate his appearance as no more than 1 out of 10) and earns $X per year. How much would X have to be for this woman to prefer a man in the bottom 10 percent, in terms of attractiveness, to a man in the top 10 percent?

The answer is that the seriously unattractive guy would have to earn about $186,000 more than the really hot guy in order for a woman to prefer him. This suggests that compared with income, looks are very important to women.

How much does a man need to be compensated in order to encourage him to date a woman in the bottom of the distribution in terms of appearance? Well, it just isn't possible. Either men care so much about appearance, or so little about income, that it is impossible to financially compensate them sufficiently to encourage them to make that choice.

I said that attractive people are expensive on the market, and this measure tells us
exactly
how expensive they are in terms of how much of a future partner's income a woman would be willing to forgo in order to date a very attractive man. But, there are other trade-offs that people make in dating that are harder to measure in terms of monetary value. For example, some people will sacrifice the opportunity to date an attractive individual in favor of someone who shares religious beliefs. Others will choose a partner with the same education as themselves at the expense of finding someone who is their ideal height. We observe that men prefer to marry younger women, but some men will forgo the opportunity to find a younger wife if he can find an older woman who is willing to provide him with financial stability (more on this in
chapter 9
).

Other research, such as that by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Maitreesh Ghatak, and Jeanne Lafortune, shows that in India the preference for people to marry within their own caste is so strong that both men and women are willing to marry someone with fewer years of education in order to make a within-caste marriage possible.

In the final analysis, a person's willingness to sacrifice one quality on their “must have” list over another quality depends on their own personal set of preferences, specifically, how they value one trait relative to another. How much they will ultimately have to sacrifice, on the other hand, will depend
on their own value on the market, which depends on the distribution of marketable qualities of those with whom they are competing.

“I'M NOT WILLING TO SETTLE, AND NEITHER SHOULD YOU”

Try this as an exercise: Give yourself an honest score on a scale of 1 to 10 that represents where you believe you sit in the distribution of physical appearance for your gender and age. For example, if you feel that you are better looking than 70 percent of all men/women your age but not as good looking as anyone in the top 30 percent, then you should give yourself a rating of 7. This is your self-assessment of where you sit on the market.

Now go onto an online dating site and do a search for people the same gender and age as yourself (you will probably have to set up a fake alternative gender profile in order to do this), feeling free to make the market as big as you like, and take a look at the profile pictures of people who are advertising themselves there. My guess is that if you randomly chose ten profile pictures and rated them in order of attractiveness, you would find that your initial self-assessment overstated your position in the distribution in terms of appearance. That is, the people in the pictures that you ranked at your attractiveness level are objectively better looking than you are.

The reason for this discrepancy is not necessarily that you initially overstated yourself in terms of looks (okay, you probably did, but that isn't the point), nor is the reason that only the really good-looking people are operating on online dating sites. The reason is this: everyone can find at least one really good picture. If everyone puts their very best picture on their online dating profile, then anyone trying to estimate the distribution of attractiveness using dating-profile pictures will almost certainly overestimate the average level of attractiveness for people of that gender who are searching on that market.

If this is the case, then when you meet face-to-face with a person from an online setup, or when someone sends you more pictures, you will then be tempted to underestimate their value since you have already overestimated how attractive people are, on average, on the market.