Our political beliefs influence how we advertise ourselves romantically, according to the popular dating website OkCupid.
Are political beliefs important to dating success? According to the Match Group site, 50% of people would opt out of dating someone with opposing political views, a figure that has been steadily rising since 2008.
OkCupid looked at words used on tens of thousands of OkCupid profiles to see which ones best distinguish liberals and conservatives. They then compared those words to OkCupid match questions.
“Whether we’re aware of it or not, our political beliefs influence how we advertise ourselves romantically," according to OkCupid.
“To dig into this, we looked at words used on tens of thousands of OkCupid profiles to see which ones best distinguish liberals and conservatives, and then compared those words to OkCupid match questions.”
After looking at 190,000 profiles the site found some “high level” findings about words that are most distinguishing for liberals and conservatives, meaning “the words you see here most likely indicate someone’s political party.”
Interest in shows like The Daily Show, NPR and Broad City were all very likely to distinguish you as a liberal, whereas using words such as “Jesus”, “faith”, “guns” and “Marines” would tag you as a conservative.
And while conservatives interested in love were likely to enjoy “the outdoors” or “shooting ranges”, liberals looking for love preferred “museums”, “yoga” and “crying”.
Liberals and conservatives were also shown to have different preferences when it came to entertainment, with liberals preferring the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Stephen King and Harry Potter and conservatives swaying more towards the likes of The Walking Dead, Disney and Frank Sinatra.
The analysis was gathered from 190,000 real OkCupid profiles. These users must have joined in 2016, been from the U.S., and indicated whether they were a “liberal” or a “conservative.” On average, these users answered about 140 questions and their written essays had about 1,000 characters. The context of the words used was not known, only that they were mentioned in profiles.
To account for the fact that most OkCupid users identify as liberal, they determined the left-right position of each word by comparing the percentage of liberals that used that word to the percentage of conservatives that used it.
Use this link to see the full report.
