36. Donald & Kamala sitting in a tree... K-I-S-S-I-N-G

Hi friends,

Welcome to the thirty-sixth dispatch of How Humans Flourish, a research-informed newsletter on how humans thrive.

I know the subject line of this newsletter is quite salacious, but I promise it’s not just click bait.

As uncomfortable as it may initially feel, take a minute and truly think about it: in terms of what we know about both presidential candidates, how likely is it that they would be romantically attracted to each other? 

And whatever your answer… how do you know? 

This month, we’re reading New York Times Bestseller Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity–What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves by data scientist and technology founder Christian Rudder. 

Dataclysm was published in 2014, and while some of the numbers have shifted (in 2014, OkCupid had 10 million active users, today it has over 70 million), general trends have not. And this is important to note, because not even Gallup or our most esteemed academic institutions have access to the unvarnished preferences and opinions of millions of monthly users.

Rudder goes into quite a bit of detail describing confounding factors, which he defines as the “technical term for something you haven’t accounted for in your analysis but that nonetheless affects its results.” 

He writes, “If you stand on the southwest corner of Fifty-Eighth and Fifth with a clipboard and do a little people-watching, you can very quickly conclude that most New Yorkers are beautiful, thin, and above all, rich. Every thread, every grommet, every crease shines with money. Of course, many New Yorkers are rich, but that’s not the whole story here. You’re standing outside Bergdorf Goodman, and that’s a confounding factor.”

He continues, “When you have seemingly every variable and every possibility available for analysis and speculation, your research is free to travel wherever your curiosity leads. But true to the cliché, that freedom requires eternal vigilance. When you’re looking at how two American strangers behave in a romantic context, race is the ultimate confounding factor.”

On OkCupid, a person is asked a series of questions (hundreds even) and their 'match percentage' measures compatibility based on their answers to the questions, without considering appearance. The questions reflect their beliefs, needs, and sense of humor. Among the platform's four largest racial groups—Asian, Black, Latino, and white—compatibility is similar across races, with factors like religion, politics, and education having a greater impact than race. Meaning, when people of different races match, their probability of compatibility is the same as with any other race.

Despite this, Rudder writes, “this racial neutrality is only in theory. Everything changes once a full profile with the photo dominating the page comes into play. This is how OKCupid’s users rate each other by race (think of the normalized number as the men’s relative preference for women. For example, as you can see, Asian men think Asian women are 18 percent better-looking than the average, while black men think they’re just 2 percent better):”

In Rudder’s own words, “The two essential patterns of male-to-female attraction are plain: men tend to like women of their own race. Far more than that, though, they don’t like black women.”

What is the demo of the average OkCupid heterosexual male user?

They are a bit younger than the national average (OkCupid’s median age is twenty-nine), and they tend to be less religious. Going one demographic level deeper, OkCupid users are more urban, more educated, and more progressive than the nation at large. The site’s biggest markets are places like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, and Seattle. Eighty-five percent of the users have gone to college and self-described liberals outnumber self-described conservatives more than two to one. There is a broad, site-wide ethos of open-mindedness. 

Rudder then shares the numbers from competing dating sites Match.com and DateHookup. 

Now why am I sharing this, specifically?

The interest goes beyond the obvious of my own racial identity, and hones in on some interesting themes we are exploring at break*through. 

We have been actively partnering with sexual-health focused organizations, and when working on disease prevention, race and sexuality are inextricably linked. In fact, apart from gay men and transgender women, black women are the highest at-risk population for HIV transmission (the rate of new HIV infections among black women is 10 times that of white women and four times that of Latina women).

There are a few threads to tug here:

1. One is the erotic rejection of black women, coupled with the sexual vulnerability of black women.

2. The second (which we will explore next week) is the social rejection of gay men and transgender women, coupled with the sexual vulnerability of gay men and transgender women.  

3. The third is a deeper, more complicated conversation around social networks and contagions—what happens when you are in the middle of a “cluster,” and what happens when you are on the outskirts?

We’ll delve in deeper next week.

With gratitude,

P.s. Unfortunately, the Kindle version of my book doesn’t include page numbers, so I’m unable to reference specific pages.

P.p.s. 🌱 In 7 days, our community will embark on a 30-day How Humans Flourish experience where mind, body, and technology meet to ignite innovation in how we live and work. We’ll dive deep through powerful bite-sized masterclasses, intentional exercises, and meaningful group connections. Let’s grow, reflect, and rise together. RSVP here: https://bit.ly/4dL7mRh

P.p.p.s. If you can’t wait for next week and want to fall down the rabbit hole of social networks and contagions, I recommend starting with Dr. Nicholas Christakis’s work. 

P.p.p.p.s. Here’s their racial breakdown of women to men: