Are your single friends always complaining to you that there is a severe lack of acceptable fish in the Humboldt sea? If you hang around sober, chaste, proper souls then we have actual evidence to back them up.
With hopes of finding that elusive, 100%-likeminded partner dangled before them, members of the online dating site OKCupid are urged to answer a seemingly endless number of personality-sorting questions — from “Do you believe in miracles?” to “Biting?” to “Are you okay with people who grow marijuana for their own personal use?” to “Do you own a gun?” All important questions, for sure.
Of course with millions of companion-seekers utilizing OKCupid this also means that the site has an enormous amount of sortable data to draw fun conclusions from.
Yesterday on OKCupid’s blog one of the company’s social scientists — yes, they employ those — posted their findings from a lengthy study (sure!) titled “The 8 Personalities You’ll Meet When Dating in the U.S.,” an attempt to try and define regional personalities as it relates to dating and relationships — i.e. people in the southwest are outdoorsy; folks in the rust belt are not. Ta-da!
Click here for more | OKCupid
One aspect of the piece that may be of interest to you and/or your lovelorn neighbors are a series of maps that reveal trends of how various pockets of the country answered OKCupid’s questions. Direct your browser here for a full explanation of their methodology, but briefly:
“I limited this analysis to questions that have been answered over 1 million times from 2014 to 2016. This resulted in 626 questions covering a wide range of topics (e.g., sex/relationships, politics, religion) with answers from over 19 million distinct members in the United States.
I then counted how often members in 945 Census-defined Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) gave a particular answer to each question. This data meant I could create a profile for the typical user in each MSA…”
OKCupid’s researchers opted to break their findings into 13 categories — “Class,” “Cleanliness,” “Logic,” for example — and chose to list the unnumbered top ten MSAs (or bottom ten MSAs, depending on your proclivities) for each. Internet lists, as we know, make the web go round. One of the MSAs for which numbers were crunched, thankfully, was the Eureka-Arcata-Fortuna area. How did we rank? Surprisingly, maybe, the Humboldt MSA excelled in five categories:
- Most Curious Cities
- Most Drug-Friendly Cities
- Most Permissive Cities
- Most Daring Cities
- Most Vulgar Cities
Yay? If you’d like better understanding of exactly the types of questions OKCupid asks to determine that Humboldt is vulgar, again, click on over to the piece where you can scroll through the answers. Maps! Lists! Fascinating stuff.
Are you a lonely, sexually non-judgey, profane party animal? Good news! The weekend approaches, you clearly have internet access and you are living in a dating utopia, apparently!
(h/t to the LoCO reader perusing OKCupid’s blog)
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