Christian Rudder has updated the OkTrends blog, returning to the subject of race and attraction.
Rudder, who is promoting his new book, Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), collects data about whether OkCupid users’ attitudes towards race have changed since 2009.
The following stats show people’s racial preferences in 2009 – each percentage compared to the average level of attraction:
Rudder says that since then, racial bias has intensified, but interestingly users have answered OkCupid’s questions in a less biased way over the past 5 years.
In his blog post, Rudder says that these biases are true across a number of sites, and are not due to rogue outliers skewing the results:
“These biases are pervasive in the data I’ve seen. For example, 82% of non-black men on OkCupid show some bias against black women. And, similarly, it’s not outliers among the women driving the results. It’s a wholesale phenomenon: the ratings for an entire population are shifted down.”
Read the excellent post here.