A female colleague insists on giving me unsolicited advice on how to pick up women. After the most recent instance I told her that her advice was terrible. Since she has never hit on a woman—or, probably, a man for that matter—she has little to offer in the way of knowledge on the subject. She disagreed, implying that just being a woman granted her omniscience.
Which led me to an idea: I proposed a contest. We could both control the same male profiles on a dating website with our locations set to different cities with comparable demographics. (In this case, I suggested our respective hometowns, two rust belt cities in the US.) After a month, we could see who received the most replies and/or who got the most women to agree to dates. If she won, I would take her advice more seriously.
She refused to participate in the contest and dismissed my idea as stupid.
Now what if this contest was applied on a larger scale? Create a profile that is representative of the average guy, set it up in various cities, then take a sampling of men and women and see which gender is better at picking up women—electronically, at least—with the same average guy profile.
As a variation, you could put game enthusiasts against game deniers to see who is more successful and test if game works. Or, just for fun, the cage match: players versus feminists.
Certainly you’d have to control for certain factors by, if using OkCupid for example, making a rule where you can only send messages to women with observably low response rates (red dots) instead of only going after the easy targets (green dots).
Expected results:
- On average, men would outperform women in getting responses from female online daters. But, like with most things, men would have a larger standard deviation.
- More experienced men, as measured by number of sexual partners, would be the most successful, faring better than less experienced men and all women despite using the same profile.
- Similarly, those who practice game will do better than those who don’t.
- The tactics female participants actually get responses with will be much different than what they say will get responses. i.e. Women’s revealed preferences are much different from their stated preferences, or what “is” is much different from what “ought” to be true.
Has this been done already? If not, is there a student or someone else out there that can make this happen? I’d like to see the results.
Which led me to an idea: I proposed a contest. We could both control the same male profiles on a dating website with our locations set to different cities with comparable demographics. (In this case, I suggested our respective hometowns, two rust belt cities in the US.) After a month, we could see who received the most replies and/or who got the most women to agree to dates. If she won, I would take her advice more seriously.
She refused to participate in the contest and dismissed my idea as stupid.
Now what if this contest was applied on a larger scale? Create a profile that is representative of the average guy, set it up in various cities, then take a sampling of men and women and see which gender is better at picking up women—electronically, at least—with the same average guy profile.
As a variation, you could put game enthusiasts against game deniers to see who is more successful and test if game works. Or, just for fun, the cage match: players versus feminists.
Certainly you’d have to control for certain factors by, if using OkCupid for example, making a rule where you can only send messages to women with observably low response rates (red dots) instead of only going after the easy targets (green dots).
Expected results:
- On average, men would outperform women in getting responses from female online daters. But, like with most things, men would have a larger standard deviation.
- More experienced men, as measured by number of sexual partners, would be the most successful, faring better than less experienced men and all women despite using the same profile.
- Similarly, those who practice game will do better than those who don’t.
- The tactics female participants actually get responses with will be much different than what they say will get responses. i.e. Women’s revealed preferences are much different from their stated preferences, or what “is” is much different from what “ought” to be true.
Has this been done already? If not, is there a student or someone else out there that can make this happen? I’d like to see the results.