As my previous analysis suggests, there are also gender differences in the types of honesty that can be displayed. It’s well known that women place relatively more importance on personality traits than men do.
Across both samples of couples, women expressed more extreme preferences for the personality characteristics of their ideal mate.
When lesbian journalist Norah Vincent dressed up as a man for a book (I harvest some revealing quotes from her here, she had a negative experience with women judging her personality traits when out dating:
On dates with men I felt physically appraised in a way that I never did by women, and, while this made me more sympathetic to the suspicions women were bringing to their dates with Ned, it had the opposite effect, too. Somehow men’s seeming imposition of a superficial standard of beauty felt less intrusive, less harsh, than the character appraisals of women.
Since women are more selective about behavior and personality than men, women have somewhat more behavioral latitude than men, similar to how men have more latitude in their appearance (and no, this doesn’t mean that women have infinite behavioral latitude). As a result, women have more freedom to display personality traits and interests honestly; women are less likely to get rejected due to crude personality heuristics like the “nerd” one that is applied to men.
For men, higher impression management and tighter signaling is both more necessary and more expected. People, especially men, are justified in putting their best feet forward in the first round of auditions. Otherwise, you just lose out to people who aren’t necessarily better matches, but who are better at impression management; that doesn’t do anyone any favors… except the people who make the best impressions. I say to men that if you can make a good first impression with your profile, do so, and sort out the finer points of compatibility over messaging or coffee.
Due to the asymmetry in importance of behavioral/personality traits and the expectation on men to initiate, I have a suspicion that content in profiles plays a completely different role for men vs. women. The primary role of the content of men’s profiles is to attract women who’s criteria they fulfill; the primary role of the content of women’s profiles is to signal their criteria so that the right men come calling.
To be continued… I’ve only gotten through one of your points...
Given how much you have to say about it, have you considered just writing your own post as a followup? It would be easier to keep track of. :)
I’ve heard about the male/female difference in prioritization of looks/personality, but I hadn’t made the connection to the relative importance of different profile content. That’s definitely worth noting.
I’m wary of a common trap here, though. Broad heuristics are extremely valuable, if and only if no more specific heuristics are available. So, yes, it’s nice to have statistical data about all women everywhere … but if you can find out more about the kind of woman you personally want to date, that’s going to be more useful. People who are inclined towards precision and rationality are very rightly inclined to use information from well-analyzed studies over anecdotes of individuals. However, when the anecdote can give very specific information and the study cannot, the tradeoff may not be so simple.
To take a trivial example: If you know that Chez X is the most popular and highest-rated restaurant in your city, but a mutual friend tells you that your would-be date really wants to try Cafe Y, which are you going to suggest for the evening out? Okay, now what if a nationwide study concludes that most women like to see movies on dates, but all the women you know in your town prefer going dancing? As the breadth of the study subjects and the breadth of the anecdotal subjects converge, the study will have better data. Somewhere between there and the trivial example, there’s a line, and on the trivial example’s side of that line, you’re better off trusting your friend.
Perhaps one of the errors in my post was assuming that people on LW are seeking partners more like the sort of person who posts out on LW, and less like the average OKCupid member sampled on OKTrends.
Continued from here
As my previous analysis suggests, there are also gender differences in the types of honesty that can be displayed. It’s well known that women place relatively more importance on personality traits than men do.
Botwin and Buss (1997) found that:
When lesbian journalist Norah Vincent dressed up as a man for a book (I harvest some revealing quotes from her here, she had a negative experience with women judging her personality traits when out dating:
Since women are more selective about behavior and personality than men, women have somewhat more behavioral latitude than men, similar to how men have more latitude in their appearance (and no, this doesn’t mean that women have infinite behavioral latitude). As a result, women have more freedom to display personality traits and interests honestly; women are less likely to get rejected due to crude personality heuristics like the “nerd” one that is applied to men.
For men, higher impression management and tighter signaling is both more necessary and more expected. People, especially men, are justified in putting their best feet forward in the first round of auditions. Otherwise, you just lose out to people who aren’t necessarily better matches, but who are better at impression management; that doesn’t do anyone any favors… except the people who make the best impressions. I say to men that if you can make a good first impression with your profile, do so, and sort out the finer points of compatibility over messaging or coffee.
Due to the asymmetry in importance of behavioral/personality traits and the expectation on men to initiate, I have a suspicion that content in profiles plays a completely different role for men vs. women. The primary role of the content of men’s profiles is to attract women who’s criteria they fulfill; the primary role of the content of women’s profiles is to signal their criteria so that the right men come calling.
To be continued… I’ve only gotten through one of your points...
Given how much you have to say about it, have you considered just writing your own post as a followup? It would be easier to keep track of. :)
I’ve heard about the male/female difference in prioritization of looks/personality, but I hadn’t made the connection to the relative importance of different profile content. That’s definitely worth noting.
I’m wary of a common trap here, though. Broad heuristics are extremely valuable, if and only if no more specific heuristics are available. So, yes, it’s nice to have statistical data about all women everywhere … but if you can find out more about the kind of woman you personally want to date, that’s going to be more useful. People who are inclined towards precision and rationality are very rightly inclined to use information from well-analyzed studies over anecdotes of individuals. However, when the anecdote can give very specific information and the study cannot, the tradeoff may not be so simple.
To take a trivial example: If you know that Chez X is the most popular and highest-rated restaurant in your city, but a mutual friend tells you that your would-be date really wants to try Cafe Y, which are you going to suggest for the evening out? Okay, now what if a nationwide study concludes that most women like to see movies on dates, but all the women you know in your town prefer going dancing? As the breadth of the study subjects and the breadth of the anecdotal subjects converge, the study will have better data. Somewhere between there and the trivial example, there’s a line, and on the trivial example’s side of that line, you’re better off trusting your friend.
Perhaps one of the errors in my post was assuming that people on LW are seeking partners more like the sort of person who posts out on LW, and less like the average OKCupid member sampled on OKTrends.