The online dat­ing web­site OkCu­pid has a rather fas­ci­nat­ing blog, OkTrends, writ­ten by two of the four math­e­mat­ics majors who founded the site.

Still in it’s infancy the blog has a few fas­ci­nat­ing posts study­ing data gleamed from their expan­sive user base.

Start­ing out with a brief look at their match­ing algo­rithm and the con­trol group used for their stud­ies, here’s data on how dif­fer­ent reli­gions ‘match’ on the site. Con­clu­sions, taken ver­ba­tim from the post:

  • Jews and Agnos­tics get along bet­ter with peo­ple. Jew­ish men, in par­tic­u­lar, have an above aver­age match per­cent­age with every reli­gious group. They even match Mus­lim women bet­ter than Mus­lim men do.
  • Mus­lims of both sexes and Hindu men get along worse.
  • Catholics are more uni­ver­sally liked than Protestants.
  • The less seri­ous you are about reli­gion, the bet­ter liked you are, even by very reli­gious people.

The ana­lysts also noted how Mus­lims and Protes­tants on the site tend to be more intense about their beliefs than other reli­gions, and Jews and Agnos­tics are by far the least serious.

Another sen­si­tive issue tack­led through the magic of online dat­ing sta­tis­tics is that of race and the reply rates between them. Some more observations:

  • Black women are […] the most likely to reply to your first mes­sage. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the aver­age, and over­all black women reply about a quar­ter more often.
  • White men get more responses.
  • White women pre­fer white men to the exclu­sion of every­one else.
  • Asian and His­panic women pre­fer [white men] even more exclu­sively [than white women].
  • Men don’t write black women back [as] often than they should (sta­tis­ti­cally speak­ing, obviously).
  • Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essen­tially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.
  • Even though white males get the most replies, they respond about 20% less often than non-white males.
  • Between 2 and 7% of males and females of all races believe inter­ra­cial mar­riage is a bad idea.
  • Around 20% of males and females of all races, except whites, have a racial background/skin colour preference.
  • 40% of white males and 54% of white females have this preference.

It’s worth not­ing the following:

Just because a group has low match per­cent­ages, even across the board, that does not mean they are bad peo­ple. It just means that they’re harder to please. The con­verse is also true. […] In any event, please keep in mind that each indi­vid­ual has designed his own match­ing cri­te­ria, so the poor-matching groups aren’t fail­ing some outsider’s imposed sys­tem. Why, for exam­ple, Hindu men would match worst with Hindu women is a mystery.