Freakonomics - Steven Dubner

It would be naïve to suppose that people abuse information only when they are acting as experts or agents of commerce. Agents and experts are people too—

which suggests that we are likely to abuse information in our personal lives as well, whether by withholding true information or editing the information we choose to put forth. A real-estate agent may wink and nod when she lists a “well-maintained” house, but we each have our equivalent hedges.

Think about how you describe yourself during a job interview versus how you might describe yourself on a first date. (For even more fun, compare that first-date conversation to a conversation with the same person during your tenth year of marriage.) Or think about how you might present yourself if you were going on national television for the first time. What sort of image would you want to project? Perhaps you want to seem clever or kind or good-looking; presumably you don’t want to come off as cruel or bigoted. During the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, its members took pride in publicly disparaging anybody who wasn’t a conservative white Christian. But public bigotry has since been vastly curtailed.

(Stetson Kennedy, now eighty-eight years old, attributes this evolution in some part to his long-ago “Frown Power” campaign.) Even subtle displays of bigotry, if they become public, are now costly. Trent Lott, the majority leader of the U.S.

Senate, learned this in 2002 after making a toast at a one hundredth birthday party for Strom Thurmond, his fellow senator and fellow southerner. Lott made a reference in his toast to Thurmond’s 1948 campaign for president, which was built on a platform of segregation; Mississippi—Lott’s home state—was one of just four states that Thurmond carried. “We’re proud of it,” Lott told the partygoers. “And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.” The implication that Lott was a fan of segregation raised enough of a fury that he was forced to quit his Senate leadership post.

Even if you are a private citizen, you surely wouldn’t want to seem bigoted while appearing in public. Might there be a way to test for discrimination in a public setting?

Unlikely as it may seem, the television game show The Weakest Link provides a unique laboratory to study discrimination. An import from the United Kingdom, The Weakest Link for a short time became wildly popular in the United States.

The game includes eight contestants (or, in a later daytime version, six) who each answer trivia questions and compete for a single cash jackpot. But the player who answers the most questions correctly isn’t necessarily the player who advances. After each round, every contestant votes to eliminate one other contestant. A player’s trivia-answering ability is presumably the only worthwhile factor to consider; race, gender, and age wouldn’t seem to matter.

But do they? By measuring a contestant’s actual votes against the votes that would truly best serve his self-interest, it’s possible to tell if discrimination is at play.

The voting strategy changes as the game progresses. In the first several rounds, it makes sense to eliminate bad players since the jackpot grows only when correct answers are given. In later rounds, the strategic incentives are flipped. The value of building the jackpot is now outweighed by each contestant’s desire to win the jackpot. It’s easier to do that if you eliminate the other good players. So, roughly speaking, the typical contestant will vote to eliminate the worse players in the early rounds and the better players in the later rounds.

The key to measuring the Weakest Link voting data is to tease out a contestant’s playing ability from his race, gender, and age. If a young black man answers a lot of questions correctly but is voted off early, discrimination would seem to be a factor. Meanwhile, if an elderly white woman doesn’t answer a single question correctly and is still not voted off, some sort of discriminatory favoritism would seem to be at play.

Again, keep in mind that all of this is happening on camera. A contestant knows that his friends, family, and co-workers are watching. So who, if anyone, is discriminated against on The Weakest Link?

Not, as it turns out, blacks. An analysis of more than 160 episodes reveals that black contestants, in both the early and late rounds of the game, are eliminated at a rate commensurate with their trivia-answering abilities. The same is true for female contestants. In a way, neither of these findings is so surprising. Two of the most potent social campaigns of the past half-century were the civil rights movement and the feminist movement, which demonized discrimination against blacks and women, respectively.

So perhaps, you say hopefully, discrimination was practically eradicated during the twentieth century, like polio.

Or more likely, it has become so unfashionable to discriminate against certain groups that all but the most insensitive people take pains to at least appear fair-minded, at least in public. This hardly means that discrimination itself has ended—only that people are embarrassed to show it. How might you determine whether the lack of discrimination against blacks and women represents a true absence or just a charade? The answer can be found by looking at other groups that society doesn’t protect as well. Indeed, the Weakest Link voting data do indicate two kinds of contestants who are consistently discriminated against: the elderly and Hispanics.

Among economists, there are two leading theories of discrimination.

Interestingly, elderly Weakest Link contestants seem to suffer from one type, while Hispanics suffer the other. The first type is called taste-based discrimination, which means that one person discriminates simply because he prefers to not interact with a particular type of other person. In the second type, known as information-based discrimination, one person believes that another type of person has poor skills, and acts accordingly.

On The Weakest Link, Hispanics suffer information-based discrimination. Other contestants seem to view the Hispanics as poor players, even when they are not.

This perception translates into Hispanics’ being eliminated in the early rounds even if they are doing well and not being eliminated in the later rounds, when other contestants want to keep the Hispanics around to weaken the field.

Elderly players, meanwhile, are victims of taste-based discrimination: in the early rounds and late rounds, they are eliminated far out of proportion to their skills. It seems as if the other contestants—this is a show on which the average age is thirty-four—simply don’t want the older players around.

It’s quite possible that a typical Weakest Link contestant isn’t even cognizant of his discrimination toward Hispanics and the elderly (or, in the case of blacks and women, his lack of discrimination). He is bound to be nervous, after all, and excited, playing a fast-moving game under the glare of television lights. Which naturally suggest another question: how might that same person express his preferences—and reveal information about himself—in the privacy of his home?

In a given year, some forty million Americans swap intimate truths about themselves with complete strangers. It all happens on Internet dating sites. Some of them, like Match.com, eHarmony.com, and Yahoo Singles, appeal to a broad audience. Others cater to more specific tastes: ChristianSingles.com, JDate.com, LatinMatcher.com, BlackSinglesConnection.com, CountryWesternSingles.com, USMilitarySingles.com, PlusSizeSingles.com, and Gay.com. Dating websites are the most successful subscription-based business on the Internet.

Each site operates a bit differently, but the gist is this: You compose a personal ad about yourself that typically includes a photo, vital statistics, your income range, level of education, likes and dislikes, and so on. If the ad catches someone’s fancy, that someone will e-mail you and perhaps arrange a date. On many sites, you also specify your dating aims: “long-term relationship,” “a casual lover,” or

“just looking.”

So there are two massive layers of data to be mined here: the information that people include in their ads and the level of response gleaned by any particular ad. Each layer of the data can be asked its own question. In the case of the ads, how forthright (and honest) are people when it comes to sharing their personal information? And in the case of the responses, what kind of information in personal ads is considered the most (and least) desirable?

Two economists and a psychologist recently banded together to address these questions. Ali Hortaçsu, Günter J. Hitsch, and Dan Ariely analyzed the data from one of the mainstream dating sites, focusing on roughly 30,000 users, half in Boston and half in San Diego. Fifty-seven percent of the users were men, and the median age range for all users was twenty-six to thirty-five. Although they represented an adequate racial mix to reach some conclusions about race, they were predominantly white.

They were also a lot richer, taller, skinnier, and better-looking than average. That, at least, is what they wrote about themselves. More than 4 percent of the online daters claimed to earn more than $200,000 a year, whereas fewer than 1 percent of typical Internet users actually earn that much, suggesting that three of the four big earners were exaggerating. Male and female users typically reported that they are about an inch taller than the national average. As for weight, the men were in line with the national average, but the women typically said they weighed about twenty pounds less than the national average.

Most impressively, fully 70 percent of the women claimed “above average”

looks, including 24 percent claiming “very good looks.” The online men too were gorgeous: 67 percent called themselves “above average,” including 21 percent with “very good looks.” This leaves only about 30 percent of the users with

“average” looks, including a paltry 1 percent with “less than average” looks—

which suggests that the typical online dater is either a fabulist, a narcissist, or simply resistant to the meaning of “average.” (Or perhaps they are all just realists: as any real-estate agent knows, the typical house isn’t “charming” or

“fantastic,” but unless you say it is, no one will even bother to take a look.) Twenty-eight percent of the women on the site said they were blond, a number far beyond the national average, which indicates a lot of dyeing, or lying, or both.

Some users, meanwhile, were bracingly honest. Eight percent of the men—about 1 in every 12—conceded that they were married, with half of these 8 percent reporting that they were “happily married.” But the fact that they were honest doesn’t mean they were rash. Of the 258 “happily married” men in the sample, only 9 chose to post a picture of themselves. The reward of gaining a mistress was evidently outweighed by the risk of having your wife discover your personal ad. (“And what were you doing on that website?” the husband might bluster, undoubtedly to little avail.)

Of the many ways to fail on a dating website, not posting a photo of yourself is perhaps the most certain. (Not that the photo necessarily is a photo of yourself; it may well be some better-looking stranger, but such deception would obviously backfire in time.) A man who does not include his photo gets only one-fourth the volume of e-mail response of a man who does; a woman who doesn’t include her photo gets only one-sixth the response. A low-income, poorly educated, unhappily employed, not-very-attractive, slightly overweight, and balding man who posts his photo stands a better chance of gleaning some e-mails than a man who says he makes $200,000 and is deadly handsome but doesn’t post a photo.

There are plenty of reasons someone might not post a photo—he’s technically challenged or is ashamed of being spotted by friends or is just plain unattractive—but as in the case of a brand-new car with a for-sale sign, prospective customers will assume he’s got something seriously wrong under the hood.

Getting a date is hard enough as it is. Fifty-seven percent of the men who post ads don’t receive even one e-mail; 23 percent of the women don’t get a single response. The traits that do draw a big response, meanwhile, will not be a big surprise to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the sexes. In fact, the preferences expressed by online daters fit snugly with the most common stereotypes about men and women.

For instance, men who say they want a long-term relationship do much better than men looking for an occasional lover. But women looking for an occasional lover do great. For men, a woman’s looks are of paramount importance. For women, a man’s income is terribly important. The richer a man is, the more e-mails he receives. But a woman’s income appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off. Men want to date students, artists, musicians, veterinarians, and celebrities (while avoiding secretaries, retirees, and women in the military and law enforcement). Women do want to date military men, policemen, and firemen (possibly the result of a 9/11 Effect, like the higher payments to Paul Feldman’s bagel business), along with lawyers and financial executives. Women avoid laborers, actors, students, and men who work in food services or hospitality. For men, being short is a big disadvantage (which is probably why so many lie about it), but weight doesn’t much matter. For women, being overweight is deadly (which is probably why they lie). For a man, having red hair or curly hair is a downer, as is baldness—but a shaved head is okay. For a woman, salt-and-pepper hair is bad, while blond hair is very good. In the world of online dating, a headful of blond hair on a woman is worth about the same as having a college degree—and, with a $100 dye job versus a $100,000

tuition bill, an awful lot cheaper.

In addition to all the information about income, education, and looks, men and women on the dating site listed their race. They were also asked to indicate a preference regarding the race of their potential dates. The two preferences were

“the same as mine” or “it doesn’t matter.” Like the Weakest Link contestants, the website users were now publicly declaring how they felt about people who didn’t look like them. They would act on their actual preferences later, in confidential e-mails to the people they wanted to date.

Roughly half of the white women on the site and 80 percent of the white men declared that race didn’t matter to them. But the response data tell a different story. The white men who said that race didn’t matter sent 90 percent of their e-mail queries to white women. The white women who said race didn’t matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men.

Is it possible that race really didn’t matter for these white women and men and that they simply never happened to browse a nonwhite date that interested them? Or, more likely, did they say that race didn’t matter because they wanted to come across—especially to potential mates of their own race—as open-minded?