What Do White People Really Like?
Sept. 10, 2010— -- What do Tom Clancy, Van Halen and golfing have in common?
According to the dating website OkCupid, they're all stuff white people really like.
The popular blog (and now book) Stuff White People Like may have been the first to plumb the world of white people online. But, this week, OkCupid took the next step and analyzed profiles of online daters to figure out the tastes and interests of members by race.
The company selected about 500,000 random profiles from its total pool of 5.6 million active members and separated them into groups by their self-stated race and gender. The users' profile essays were then analyzed, and the company pulled out the words and phrases that were disproportionately represented in each group.
"If you start looking through them, you start to see and you can just understand that while, yes, there is assimilation going on and definitely America is one culture, each of these ethnicities and races have very unique properties in the way that they describe themselves," said Sam Yagan, co-founder and CEO of OkCupid. "They're pretty powerful."
He said the site has members across the country, but skews slightly toward urban areas, such as New York, San Francisco and Chicago.
While the results may not be earth-shattering, they still reveal some interesting trends. OkCupid's analysis determined people of all races tend to include the names of personalities who share their race -- white men list Tom Clancy, black women mention Alicia Keys.
Black women tend to reference religion and spirituality far more than other race-gender groups.
OkCupid found that white men tend to list "frat house" terms (brew, grilling and Phish, for example), while white women gravitate toward "escapism." Novelists Jodi Pecault, Nicholas Sparks and Nora Ephron feature high on their list of words.
In its blog post, the dating site also suggested that Latino men were an interesting study in contrasts. Their words indicated an interest in humor (I'm a funny guy, very funny, outgoing) as well as interest in "industrial strength *ss-kicking" (for example, mma, ufc, boxing and marines).
"Basically, if a Latin dude tells you a joke, you should laugh," OkCupid said.
OkCupid generated lists for a number of racial and ethnic groups, but to see snippets of their lists for white, black, Latino and Asian men and woman click on to the next page.
