These are big questions, and here’s how we answered them.

We selected 526,000 OkCupid users at random and divided them into groups by their (self-stated) race. We then took a lot of these people’s profile essays (280 million words in total!) and isolated the words and phrases that made each racial group’s essays statistically distinct from the others’.

For instance, it turns out that each one forms of people list sushi as one of their favorite foods. But Asians are the simplest group who also list sashimi; it’s a racial outlier. Similarly, as we shall see, black individuals are 20 times more likely than everyone else to mention soul food, whereas no foods are distinct for white people , unless you count diet coke.

Using this type of analysis, we were able find the interests, hobbies, tastes, and self-descriptions which can be specially important to each racial group, as determined by the words of the crowd itself. The tips in this newsletter will not be our opinion. It’s data, aggregated from the essays of half a million real people.

So here’s the true stuff white people like.

Click on the icons to toggle between men/women.

In general, I won’t comment too much on these lists, because the entire point of this piece is to let the groups speak for themselves, but I need to say that the mind of the white man is the arena’s greatest sausagefest. Unless you’re counting Queens of the Stone Age, there isn’t even one vaguely feminine thing on his list, and as far as broad categories go we now have: sweaty guitar rock, bro-on-bro comedies, things with engines, and dystopias.

As for the interests of a white woman, you’ve got romance novels, some country music, and, weirdly, the Red Sox. It’s also amazing the extent to which her list shows a pastoral or rural self-mythology: bonfires, boating, horseback riding, thunderstorms. I remind you that OkCupid’s user base is nearly all in large cities, where to 1 degree or another, when you’re doing much of any of these items, civilization has come to an end.

If I had to decide on over-arching themes for white people’s lists, for men, I’d pick ” frat house” and for ladies, ” escapism.” Whether one begot the opposite is a query I’ll leave to the reader.

Stuff black people like.

Hopefully it’s been obvious that the font-size of a phrase indicates the relative frequency with which it seems that. So, toggling between black men and black women above, you will see that that while soul food is vital to both, however it’s really, really important to the girls. In truth, soul food and black women is the one strongest phrase/group pair we found.

The above lists also make it clear that, no matter whether Jesus himself was black, his most vocal followers definitely are. Religious expressions weren’t the various top phrases for any of the alternative races, but they’re everywhere for black men and (especially) black women, for whom 13 of the end 50 phrases are religious. Black persons are over 100% more likely than average to mention their faith in their profiles.

Finally, it’s worth nothing that of the four lists we’ve seen to this point, black women’s is the only real one to explicitly include someone of another race: Justin Timberlake.

Double finally, how bold is it that I am cool is the second commonest phrase for black men?

Stuff Latinos like.

Music and dancing-merengue, bachata, reggaeton, salsa-are obviously extremely important to Latinos of both genders. The lads have two other fascinating things happening: an interest in telling you about their sense of humor (i’m a funny guy, very funny, outgoing and funny, etc.) and an interest in industrial strength ass-kicking (mma, ufc, boxing, marines, etc.) Basically, if a Latin dude tells you a joke, you could laugh.

Latinas’ interests are fairly typical for a dating site: you bought friends, career, education, movies, music, a number of physical details, and, oh yeah…morbid fear. We dug further into I’m fearful of (on their list at #42 ) and found which words typically came next. It’s mostly insects and ” the dark” , though one expert tautologist is ” frightened of being scared” and another woman is ” afraid of Martians.”

I feel obligated to state, on behalf of white men everywhere: That woman should get a grip. Martians are nothing compared to the Sardaukar.

Stuff Asians like.

As you can find, both Asian males and females choose I am simple as a prominent self-description. Contrast this to black men’s I am cool and Latinos’ I’m a funny guy. It’s also interesting that Asian men very often mention their specific heritage (taiwan, korea, singapore, vietnam, china) while Asian women don’t.

So far, I’ve undergone racial groups in order of their prominence on OkCupid. For brevity (I know here is the net), I’ll present the remainder lists without foolish commentary. You may click any of the links to expose them inline.

Stuff Indians like.

Stuff Middle Easterners like.

Stuff Pacific Islanders like.

Sidenote: reading level

Since we were parsing all this article anyway, we thought it might be cool to perform a little basic reading-level analysis on what people had written about themselves. We used the Coleman-Liau Index , and once we partitioned the essays by the race of the writers, we found this:

Before anyone gets too charged-up about this, we also ran reading level by religion and found this:

Is there a Comic Sans version of the Bible? There really have to be. We subdivided this chart further, by how serious all and sundry was about their beliefs:

It’s interesting to note that for all of the faith-based belief systems I’ve listed, the folks who are the least eager about them write at the best level. However, the folks who are most eager about not having faith (i.e. the ” very serious” agnostics and atheists) score higher than any religious groups.

Thanks for reading, everyone. We’ll be revisiting race later this month, with a statistical investigation of interracial dating, and we’re almost finished with the item on (bi-)sexuality we promised last time.

See you soon,

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This post is tagged: different races, half a million, million words, profile essays, queens of the stone age, romance novels