Researchers recently took data from the Facebook app Are You Interested and found that not only is race a factor in our online dating interests, but particular races get disproportionately high — and low — amounts of interest.
Of the 2.4 million heterosexual interactions researchers reviewed, the findings show:
- Women get three times the interactions men do.
- All men seemed to be more interested in people outside their race.
- Black men and women get the lowest response rates to their messages.
- All women except Black women are most drawn to white men, and men of all races (with one notable exception) prefer Asian women.
The notable exception is that Asian men prefer Latino women.
The business site using Quartz graphed these preferences using data on the percentage of “yes” responses to the “Are you interested?” question on the app. The data suggest some uncomfortable stories about racial preferences in online dating.
Back in 2009, the folks over at OKCupid culled through the site’s data and similarly found that race played a big role in who would respond to messages, with some similar (and a few different) findings.
Some quick facts from the OKCupid data:
- Black women respond the most.
- White men get more replies from almost every group.
- White women prefer white men; Asian and Latina women prefer them “even more exclusively.”
Read the full story on NPR
