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Comment by tiahura | Hacker News Reader

“People are saying that the reason that incels struggle to find relationships and sex is because their standards are too high, and what we were able to demonstrate here is, compared to our group of men that weren't incel, actually their minimum mate preferences were a lot lower.

"At least that's what they told us anyway."

“Once you overestimate in your mind the importance of physical attractiveness to women, and underestimate the influence of kindness, you start looking for evidence that confirms that world view," he said.”

——

Do we have strong evidence that women value kindness over attractiveness, beyond that's what they told us anyway?

Haven’t there been studies, of all sorts of species, backed by reasonable suppositions about evolutionary pressures, that kindness might not be what young fertile females are looking for in a mate?

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Pre-web, I used to work at a dating service doing many things, but the data entry, number crunching, etc. part was my main job. I really should have moved the data off of dBase III floppies but first I noticed trends, then I ran numbers to confirm my suspicions.

The gulf between what people say they want and what they actually do (whom they ask out, or from whom they will accept requests) is vast. Self-reporting is largely a matter of public relations. People who refer to evolutionary psychology as "evo psych" are dog-whistling for the tabula rasa crowd and can be safely ignored; you can't tell them anything they don't want to hear anyway.

In any case, your worst suspicions are likely to be true. Men did the asking out, by and large. Men were bigger on the shotgun approach, also no surprise. We asked people to rate each preference as to how important it was to them ("do you really need blue eyes?") and women, on average, rated all of their preferences as more important than the men did. Height was almost always in the top three for women, in terms of preferences, in terms of whom they asked out if that did happen, and from whom they would accept requests. That and income.

I've seen other studies, later, which bore all of this out, but if you want the true dirt, you go look at what people actually do, not what they want someone to think they do.

It might be interesting to take photos of couples and have members of the opposite sex rate each member's attractiveness. Then analyze the data. That would go with the approach of measuring actions instead of stated preferences.

I'm an evo psych guy. But isn't the top 3 preferences of women to be income and height completely inline with what the eco psych people claim? And you're saying people self reported height and income as a preference but the behavior doesn't play out with what people actually do?

No.

If you went up to them on the street and asked, "Hey, how important is it that a guy be tall?" you would get a response that would sound a lot better than what they fill out with nobody looking. You have to take it out of a public context and also bury it along with a bunch of other things to de-emphasize it. Meanwhile, at one point Tumblr, Twitter had a run of women pulling faces of disappointment and/or disgust with the caption "When his height starts with a 5." And that's an in-group thing, neither private nor public.

People have a lot of different facets of themselves -- something that Zuckerberg really didn't get -- each shown to a different audience. If you've ever watched a bunch of women do this "performative disdain" routine, wherein they make displays to other women that they, too, have high standards, that's definitely a facet that is neither entirely public nor completely private. I recall a recent car commercial to that effect, where women were inferring something about a man due to his choice of vehicle, and were doing performative disdain based on that.

Interesting. "Performative disdain." Is there an actual formal study that accounts for it? Doesn't it actually look worse for a woman if she acts like she cares about height?

I think your claim has merit. But I want to see studies that bypass the psychological bias. Are there any? What did you see with your data? Not just the divide in general but actual trends and actual examples.

Right, so, the question is: to who?

It looks bad if she cares about height if you just flat up ask her, alone, without peers.

It does not look as bad if she admits to it with and to her peers. You get to see mate pre-selection in action! There's a lot of chiming in. This is where the performative disdain appears. Disdain, because you will see expressions and utterances of distaste or even disgust; performative, because she is communicating this preference with her peers, partially for validation. You can catch women and even girls doing this. There's a hint of social jockeying in there. After all, by rejecting (or even pre-rejecting) someone, you're ranking them lower than you in some fashion. And there's really only two ways to increase your relative status: bring yourself up or tear someone else is down. Which is easier?

It also doesn't look that bad if the height question is mixed in with tons of other questions, and she isn't looking anyone in the eye when answering. This is the private milieu. Here, it's a questionnaire. She's at least taking a swing at being honest with her preferences.

Well, it's been a few decades, so my memory is limited. "Attractiveness" was a general self-reported category and women rated themselves higher. Interestingly, attractiveness and height overruled religion for women, even those who reported the religion answer as being at the highest rating on the scale.

We did have some psych tests besides the "barely above astrology" MBTI, namely the Taylor-Johnson.

I don't think you're going to see a lot of hardcore studies. Even OKCupid redacted their conclusions. It's really one of those areas where average people aren't ready to hear the results. The results would be unpleasant for the tabula rasa crowd and their buddies, the people who are against gender essentialism. And if it might present women in a less than brilliant light, consider the "Women Are Wonderful" effect.

>I don't think you're going to see a lot of hardcore studies.

There are ways around it. Not all studies are done by asking women and men questions about their own behavior. Psychologists are certainly aware of the biases when doing that.

For example: https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success

Of course the logical implication of the above where 17 women reproduce for every 1 man means that 1 man sires 17 children (or more) with 17 women.

Do female preferences cause this where they seek a single alpha? Or is it forced? One thing is for sure though. This outcome certainly does align with theory where the "performative disdain" by a number of women isn't actually a performance. Nothing conclusive here.

Additionally your theory here implies imitation via actual existence. Women and men create such performances to be put on display for "someone" or what's the point of the performance? Therefore enough "someones" with those preferences actually exist for such performances to become widespread.

I definitely think your theory is real. I think it's wide spread too. But I do think the performance only influences the general result by something like 30%. Roughly 30% of women are putting on a performance for the majority who do have these darker desires.

Additionally here's an interesting thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs_zs8qQGXk&t=185s

are these answers a performance? Certainly a portion. I would say though as a man if the reverse question was asked whether or not it was cheating if a woman used a male prostitute, almost every man would call it cheating and that answer is NOT a performance.

On dating websites women mostly target the top 10% in terms of looks and attractiveness. That suggests kindness isn't high on their wishlist.

However, getting yourself a dog and going for morning runs does get you approached by eligible women, so I guess it depends on the social context.

> However, getting yourself a dog and going morning runs does get you approached by eligible women, so I guess it depends on the social context.

Women want men who are reliable, having a dog and exercising regularly signals reliability. This has nothing to do with kindness.

The biggest problem with incels is that they struggle with their life in general. Toxic guys with a well put together life doesn't have issues getting women, as you say just exercise regularly and keep a dog and have other such signals and women will come to you.

And it’s not even about women. This just applies to anyone looking for a romantic partner.

Who doesn’t want all of those traits? They’re the whole package. People have standards, and it seems so-called incels aren’t comfortable with that.

Women who aren't reliable have no problems getting guys, so no it isn't the same for both sides.

> Who doesn’t want all of those traits?

Sure, but we are talking about preferences, men prioritizes other traits even though they of course would like to have the perfect woman.

In my anecdotal experience, I chalk it down to inexperience.

After a couple of unsuccessful committed relationships, people get their standards in place. It’s hard to imagine healthy adults want to date unreliable individuals romantically.

I don’t think it’s a gendered issue.

The reason doesn't matter, the end result is that unreliable women doesn't have issues getting guys as long as they are nice and not obese.

Ditzy women is a popular trope for a reason.

Incels are often that way because they don’t actually have standards/know how to mind their boundaries with women, know they’ll get fucked over because of it (and likely already were by one close to them - Mom) and are afraid to let anyone close enough to find that out.

So sabotage themselves constantly and project that internalized anger into others.

Source for that first sentence? It’s a common trope, seems to emanate from the “red pill” community.

From what I’ve heard, it came from a (flawed) study performed by some dating app. I don’t buy it.

Reference to the flaws?

Decades ago, I worked for a dating website - and it lined up with the reality in the ground based on what I saw, except the study actually seemed to be softpedaling the actual data.

And I saw the constants used to fudge the public numbers at the site I worked at, so dudes weren’t so depressed they ran away.

Something like FEMALE_COUNT_MULTIPLIER = 9 if I remember correctly.

Isn’t the ratio between men and women on these apps a problem that messes up the interpretation of these observations? Genuinely curious.

Which interpretation? And which sites?

Most sites even back then were using generated female profiles to fill things out; and bots to create some messages for male customers who were ‘not engaged enough’. None of that (or total numbers multiplication) was necessary for female members.

It seemed to get much worse after I left the industry - it was sleazy back then, and it seems to have gotten waaaay worse over time.

Not surprising really.

Women use dating apps to find casual sex, so obviously they go for looks. For real, long-term relationship they typically chose someone among their friends.

Or that dating apps are a terrible way for people to go about dating.

I'm not sure how much meaningful information about "kindness" can fit in the signal a dating app/website tends to carry?

Like, we could probably study dating websites and conclude that having a pleasant voice isn't high on most people's wish list, but I imagine a fair fraction won't keep dating someone if they find their voice grating.

Dating sites put a massive thumb on the scale to looks, probably to everyone’s detriment in the long run.

Looks become less important if you know someone through work, or your friends set you up, or you meet at an activity.

I think it's also because dating sites give relatively high signal on looks and low signal on personality/chemistry. People don't necessarily filter by looks on dating sites because looks is what matters most to them, but because looks is the only dimension they have reliable enough information available to filter on.

Imagine a 1-10 scale for looks, personality, and chemistry, and imagine that a person has some minimum sum that they're looking for--say they want at least a 20 across these three categories. If dating sites give you an accurate read on looks to within 2 points, personality within 4 points, and chemistry within 6 points, then the fastest and most reliable strategy to achieve the 20 would be to filter first by looks on the dating app, then filter the other qualities in person where you can get a better measure.

Somehow, I doubt that the definition of “kind” provided by incels is the same as what women think is “kind.”

Yeah, nice-guy syndrome.

I think this is very close to the debate on altruism. I’ve met far too many people who confuse “being kind to someone” and “being a kind person”. Are you really a “kind person” if you’re kind to someone only because of what you expect or want from them?

Spend a bit of time with someone and you learn whether they’re sweet or sickly sweet….

Both kindness and physical attractiveness are poorly defined characteristics, and anyway are not the only possible positive traits someone can have. Humor, loyalty, and work ethic are other potential traits.

I’m not sure what “studies” you mean, but the applicability of animal mating behaviors to people is pretty bad for a lot of reasons. The range of behaviors is incredibly varied, from straight sperm competition, to being able to beat another animal in a fight, to gift giving, to singing, and so on.

Even if women were solely interested in how their partner would help their reproductive chances (they aren’t), humans are also massive outliers in terms of how much effort we spend on our kids so “is loyal and a good parent” is way more important than physical attractiveness.

If one supposes that what people say is, 90% of the time, them exporting their mental state, and that most people spend most of the time they are talking trying to convince themselves and others of something they think they should believe, but don’t really - things start to make more sense.

Especially if you consider how much of what is being said is projection. Every accusation is a confession, etc.

Especially if the things people really want to believe but struggle to are protective delusions.

Incels attack women because their rational mind is attempting to cope with a truth it can’t handle - they are afraid of what they would need to know and be to be in a relationship with a woman, and who they have been. And they project their own issues onto them in many cases. It’s a fear of failure, rejection, etc.

Similar with female incels. Which do very much exist.

And most of what you hear women say they want, is them trying to convince themselves that is what they want. Not what they actually want. And attempting to project their fears and failures onto others so the other party is the one to blame.

Same with incels.

If you look at actions and situations, not words, it’s a lot more obvious.

Which is why so many people go to such lengths to hide those too, to stop the cognitive dissonance and/or societal rejection from people who figure it out instead of going along with the delusion.

The widespread use of social media and the internet has made it easier to sustain these kinds of bubbles, obviously.

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