Dating still segregated, but people cross racial lines once contacted

mattradickal

Although issues related to racial identity have progressed to the point where the US is willing to elect a black president twice, its citizens still tend to keep their personal relationships segregated. When it comes to the people we spend time with, "Americans’ preference for same-race alters exceeds their preference for similarity based on any other characteristic," according to a new study of interracial dating.

Using massive amounts of data from the dating site OkCupid, UC San Diego's Kevin Lewis looked at how this self segregation plays out in the online world. Among all of the ethnic groups he examined, there's a strong tendency for people to send messages to other users who belong to the same ethnic group. But people who are willing to go against that trend are typically rewarded—recipients of those messages are more likely to respond to them. And for a short time afterward, they're more likely to initiate contacts across racial boundaries.

According to Lewis, OkCupid is structured in a way to make this sort of analysis valuable. Unlike many other dating sites, which claim to be able to discern users' compatibility via personality profiles, OkCupid lets anyone find anyone else's profile. Results can be filtered based on a set of characteristics, but they're characteristics the users set themselves, not something determined by an algorithm. As a result, the site makes it much easier for people to find and contact just about anyone else in the service.