Got a date this weekend? Want to know more about your special friend? OkTrends, the dating-research blog at OkCupid, recently released a statistical analysis of 776 million user answers to questions like “Do you believe that people have a civic duty to vote?” and “Have you ever traveled around another country alone?” OkCupid uses these answers to match the lonelies with their ideal mates. Christian Rudder distilled answers to innocuous questions to reveal the coded communication beneath, discovering which simple, breezy questions people should ask on first dates in order to find the information they really want to know (things that often aren’t discussed until after hours/weeks of grueling small talk).
For example, if you really want to know “Would you consider sleeping with someone on the first date?” ask your date “Do you like the taste of beer?”
No matter their gender or orientation, beer-lovers are 60% more likely to be okay with sleeping with someone they’ve just met.
To discover the answer to “Do my date and I have the same politics?” instead ask “Do you prefer the people in your life to be simple or complex?”
Complexity-preferrers are 65-70% likely to give the Liberal answer. And those who prefer simplicity in others are 65-70% likely to give the Conservative one.
Then there’s my favorite: Curious if your date is religious? Ask “Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?“
![For every one of the faith-based belief systems listed, the people who were the least serious wrote at the highest level [based on user profiles].](https://i0.wp.com/www.thestranger.com/images/blogimages/2011/02/10/1297385257-megachart2.png "For every one of the faith-based belief systems listed, the people who were the least serious wrote at the highest level [based on user profiles].")
- “For every one of the faith-based belief systems listed, the people who were the least serious wrote at the highest level [based on user profiles].”
If your date answers no—i.e., is okay with bad grammar and spelling—the odds of him or her being at least moderately religious is slightly better than 2:1.
But don’t forget, as xkcd reminds us, “Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.'”
These questions are way more awkward than just asking what you’re surreptitiously trying to discover.
“Do you prefer the people in your life to be simple or complex?”
That sounds really weird to me.
A user generated question on OkCupid:
“If you were to be eaten by cannibal, how would you like to be prepaired?”
After reading the earlier spelling/grammar correlation, I gather the person is “more religious,” and that I am “less religious” because the mistake annoys me, and also that if I were to be eaten by a cannibal, the person with whom I would like to be prepaired would be Daniel Craig.
I sure am looking forward to what the trolls have to say about this.
I love that “not serious Buddhists” have the best writing proficiency.
I just know your linking to that xkcd comic makes me all hot and bothered.
Okay, asking if you like simple or complex people might be awkward but I think it would be very easy to slip the taste of beer and spelling and grammar into a first date conversation.
I want to know what the odds of sex on the first date are if your date doesn’t like the taste of beer.
I agree with 1. Using a proxy variable when the variable of interest is accessible is not only stupid and annoying: it’s misleading. As the data shows, these correlations are not nearly strong enough to be at all confident about your conclusions.
Just ask! Damn you, OkTrends, for giving the cautious and “polite” a crutch to avoid actually communicating.
It seems like the taste of beer question merely separates the teetotaler prudes from everyone else. I’ve only ever had a single one night stand my entire life, but I’d still answer “yes” to the having sex on the first date question. I consider it as an option if I have a strong and immediate connection/attraction to someone, but that kind of attraction happens very rarely for me.
I dearly love xkcd, but the correlation/causation cartoon was a major fail. Anyone who has ever done a real-world scientific study knows that observational data is nearly always horribly contaminated by confounding factors. And even if it weren’t, the direction of causality is not clear: do bad spelling skills encourage people to become religious or does religiosity enourage the neglect of spelling skills?
Well, if you’re on a date and they start asking you all these off the wall question, better be looking for a passive-aggressive ’cause you got yourself one.
I want to know the magic question that will tell me how likely my match-up is to be a stalker.