Using These Dating Profile Words Can Reveal Your Personal Politics
According to the Match Group site, 50% of people would opt out of dating someone with opposing political views, a figure that has been steadily rising since 2008.
And in a recent study, called Words and Politics, the site revealed that people’s political views can also determine how singles advertise themselves online.
OkCupid explained: “Whether we’re aware of it or not, our political beliefs influence how we advertise ourselves romantically.
“To dig into this, we looked at words used on tens of thousands of OkCupid profiles to see which ones best distinguish liberals and conservatives, and then compared those words to OkCupid match questions.”
By doing this, OkCupid were able to create a picture of the opposing political spectrums, built up by users’ likes, favourite activities and interests.
What OkCupid found
Interest in shows like The Daily Show, NPR and Broad City were all very likely to distinguish you as a liberal, whereas using words such as “Jesus”, “faith”, “guns” and “Marines” would tag you as a conservative.
In addition to this, OkCupid also calculated that 74.5% of people on the site were looking for love, and 25.5% were looking for sex.
And while conservatives interested in love were likely to enjoy “the outdoors” or “shooting ranges”, liberals looking for love prefered “museums”, “yoga” and “crying”.
With regards to guns, OkCupid found that: “Conservatives interested in love use the word guns, however conservatives interested in sex use the word firearms.”
Liberals and conservatives were also shown to have different preferences when it came to entertainment, with liberals preferring the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Stephen King and Harry Potter and conservatives swaying more towards the likes of The Walking Dead, Disney and Frank Sinatra.
Kendrick Lamar was also found to be the most distinguishing artist for liberals, with “except rap” appearing in profiles weighted towards the conservative end of the spectrum, and “hip hop” more common amongst liberal profiles.
OkCupid said the members they used for the survey had answered about 140 questions, and their written essays had around 1,000 characters.
The site also admitted that “to account for the fact that most OkCupid users identify as liberal, we determined the left-right position of each word by comparing the percentage of liberals that use that word to the percentage of conservatives that use it.”
To see OkCupid’s full report of their findings, please click here.
