Optimal Cupid: Mastering the Hidden Logic of OkCupid by Christopher McKinlay

Author:Christopher McKinlay [McKinlay, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Christopher McKinlay
Published: 2014-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

Wild orcas

Picture selection is very important. Judgment will be harsh and lasting. OkCupid’s excellent blog OkTrends found that straight men send messages to attractive women at 28 times the rate they send messages to women they rated unattractive. Straight women rate a galling 80 percent of men as less attractive than average.

Check out your competition’s profiles. When you dress up to go out, you probably have some ideas about what looks good in general, what looks good on you, maybe what’s popular right now. Where did you get these ideas? From observing your competition. Your ideas about attractiveness, presentation, fashion, etc., are the product of thousands upon thousands of observations of others in various real-world situations and in the media. So don’t ignore the competition on OkC. Give your profile a temporary sex change or create a test dummy profile. Then go check out your top friends and top enemies – anyone who might be competing with you for the same matches. If you pay for an A-list subscription you can even see who is rated five stars and who is most similar to you. They look good don’t they?

Include an interesting activity photo. Consider making it your main photo. One emergent truth is that certain types of pictures correlate with greater success in meeting people through the site. Pictures that show a person doing something interesting lead on the whole to more correspondence for searchers and higher-quality correspondence for responders. Activity-oriented pictures like these – if they’re unique and tell a distinct story – make perfect hooks. Someone who doesn’t know you at all can easily say, “Wow, I didn’t know wild orcas let you ride them like that” or whatever.

Images of this kind are more effective for both searchers and responders. Younger, female responder-types might think otherwise, but they’re mistaken. OkTrends notes that young women showing off cleavage do receive more unsolicited initial messages than those shown doing interesting stuff. But the messages are of lower quality. (“DAm I got inch for you.”) When OkTrends adjusted its data to reflect unsolicited messages that led to back-and-forth conversations – in other words, the welcome kind of message – it found that the “interesting” type of image correlated with more real conversations for these women than any other subtype, including the cleavage shot (which actually correlated with a reduction in messages leading to conversations).

Be yourself, but be interesting. How you look is more important than how good-looking you are. A common misconception is that your profile pictures are there to show people what you actually look like, not who you are metaphorically. OkTrends published some empirical evidence to the contrary. They concluded that main profile pictures showing no faces whatsoever were just as successful in encouraging initial messages (though they were most likely supported by additional, more conventional face and body shots elsewhere in the profile). The faceless pictures simply needed to be interesting.

For reference, you can find my OkC profile here.

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