The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures
This is the first in a series of articles reprinted with permission from OKTrends the official blog of OKCupid.com.
Hello, old friends. I am back from dark months of data mining, here now to present my ores. To write this piece, we cataloged over 7,000 photographs on OkCupid.com, analyzing three primary things:
- Facial Attitude. Is the person smiling? Staring straight ahead? Doing that flirty lip-pursing thing?
- Photo Context. Is there alcohol? Is there a pet? Is the photo outdoors? Is it in a bedroom?
- Skin. How much skin is the person showing? How much face? How much breasts? How much ripped abs?
In looking closely at the astonishingly wide variety of ways our users have chosen to represent themselves, we discovered much of the collective wisdom about profile pictures was wrong. For interested readers, I explain our measurement process, and how we collected our data, at the end of the post. All my bar charts are zeroed on the average picture. Now to the data.
MYTH 1
It’s better to smile
One of the first things we noticed when diving into our pool of photos is that men and women have very different approaches to the camera.
Women smile almost twice as often as men do and make that flirty-face four times as often.
Now, you’re always told to look happy and make eye contact in social situations, but at least for your online dating photo, that’s just not optimal advice. For women, a smile isn’t strictly better: she actually gets the most messages by flirting directly into the camera, like the center and right-hand subjects above.
Notice that, however, that flirting away from the camera is the single worst attitude a woman can take. Certain social etiquettes apply even online: if you’re going to be making eyes at someone, it should be with the person looking at your picture.
Men’s photos are most effective when they look away from the camera and don’t smile:
Maybe women want a little mystery. What is he looking at? Slashdot? Or Engadget?
It’s interesting that while making flirty eye contact is relatively okay for men, flirting away from the camera is the worst thing they, too, can do.
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Comments
Interesting...
I think the math geekery of OK Cupid is one of the things I like most about the site. :)
I like that they (eventually) drew a distinction between how many responses a given photo type got, and how many of those responses led to an actual conversation. Because really, in my experience, more is NOT necessarily better when it comes to messages received on dating sites. Quality is a lot more important than quantity - I'd far rather receive a small number of messages from people who I actually have something in common with and find interesting than have to sift through a ton of messges from people I don't.
Another thing I found interesting in the data that they didn't comment on (unless it was just briefly in passing and I missed it) was that being pictured outdoors or with a pet or other animal correlated positively with response for men, but negatively for women. Then again, something like that could be used as a sort of screening mechanism, in a way. For women, if nature and animals are important to you, it might be worth using those pics deliberately, even if you know that they'll cut the number of responses, because they'll help screen out people who don't share those interests. I mean really, who wants to get a message from someone who wouldn't contact you if they knew you had a pet or liked camping or whatever?
The biggest weakness of the article was the lack of same-sex data - I'm curious as to how similar or different that might be. In particular, I really can't see women getting fewer responses from women if they have a pet in the picture. Having cats is practically required for successful lesbianism. :)