The recurring U-shape might be a response style effect - people who rate themselves as 'average' in looks might just be people who generally see themselves as 'normal' across the board. You mention this possibility in the politics questions but it could hold for others like agreeableness, mental illness, how loving or traditional your family is... This wouldn't explain every pattern, though! I agree that small effect sizes can be very interesting especially in such large datasets.
"This is the openness score, which is the avg of two openness questions - "I have excellent ideas" and "I have difficulty understanding abstract ideas (reversed)”."
Am I missing something, or is this a really bad measure for openness? Especially the latter question, which is basically asking about perceived intelligence.
It seems wrong both intuitively and according to the Big 5 standards, which asks questions to determine: (Ideas (curious); Fantasy (imaginative); Aesthetics (artistic); Actions (wide interests); Feelings (excitable); Values (unconventional/liberal), none of which are linked to "understanding abstract ideas".
So I'd say this graph is actually measuring intelligence + self-confidence.
> Spanking is correlated with class, like lower class families spank more, so maybe this is an artifact of that, but… why are the hottest women reporting an uptick?
There's an ugly interpretation here: Hotter women are often those who spend more time and energy on their appearance, something they do because they were raised harshly, perhaps specifically to keep up appearances as they were taught.
> It’s a bit intuitive that hotter-reporting women are more extroverted; they get more socially rewarded! It’s less intuitive that hotter women are a bit more conscientious. maybe an artifact of less mental illness?
Again, being truly hot takes work. Exercise, makeup, clothes, self-care. So hot women are ipso facto more conscientious than average.
And:
> The hotter the woman, the fewer mental illnesses she selected from the list of mental illnesses… kinda. It’s u-shaped here, which is confusing. Maybe the max hotness option is a weird artifact somehow? Maybe the women who pick being max hot are just straight up insane, but if you’re mid-to-cute you’re not insane? I don’t know. I’m not sure how this makes sense with the rest of the data and I’m curious if you guys have any theories.
Same theory. A woman with good genetics can be reasonably hot with almost no work. But *nobody* gets to super-hot without obsessing over it. And that is often either the cause of, or results in, mental illness.
Oh the other hand, "both the most unattractive and the most attractive categories report the greatest conservatism. I’m so confused." makes sense to me in an intuitive way I can't explain.
Hottest women are drawn to social conservatism because their dating pool for marriage includes the hot rich men who can afford make the lifestyle of a traditional housewife desirable. Uglier women are drawn to social conservatism because they would benefit from a less shallow, more commitment focused dating culture where they know men are less likely to lead them on to use them for sex.
Look up the hot-crazy scale. It’s a joke from himym but basically the hotter a girl is the more you’ll put with crazy, but implicitly it also is a cause of the hotness in some sense.
"I’m kinda surprised that autism and schizophrenia are ranked so low."
A couple of suggestions.
The antipsychotic medications often prescribed to those diagnosed with schizophrenia are strongly associated with 'flabby' weight gain (i.e. they make you look both hefty and unhealthy). The effect is rapid. Any woman who has been through the experience of putting on significant weight and looking more unhealthy in a short period of time is unlikely to consider herself hot.
People on the autism spectrum tend to be less influenced by groupthink (e.g. fashion) and less focused on their social presentation, such as how 'hot' they appear to others. That gives them less stake in the question as to whether they're hot and so they'd be less likely to be fooling themselves either positively or negatively about it. If that's true I'd also expect the autistic cohort to exhibit less standard deviation around self-evaluation of how hot they are.
The bimodal distributions are likely due to the divergent responses to childhood trauma: sex repulsion vs hypersexuality. The two lead to actively trying to be less or more attractive, to avoid or obtain sexual attention. These are also very prevalent dynamics among trans men and women, due to very high rates of childhood abuse.
Very plausible. There's also an (equally ugly) explanation with the opposite causality: the ugliest girls are more likely to have parents who are more disappointed in them and thus were more likely to beat them, while the prettiest girls are more likely to have had bare-bottom spankings from an abusive daddy.
"Hotness" is presumably very evolutionarily advantageous. We might therefore expect that there are few variables that reliably increase it. (The reverse applies also to "ugliness").
However there may still be variables that increase variance.
We might therefore be seeing that ugliness and hotness are caused by shared characteristics which increase variance along this dimension, but which correlate more straightforwardly with other variables.
I think this is mostly a measure of self-esteem. Consider the questions for openness (“I have great ideas”, “I have trouble understanding complex ideas”) - IMO these measure inflated self-esteem way more than they measure openness. Same for IQ and lots of other stuff. All in all I don’t think this questionnaire was very informative.
> Mid women got spanked less and have more loving families
I think what you're likely seeing is the divergent sexual response to childhood trauma: sex repulsion vs hypersexuality. These are most common with sexual trauma, but emotional trauma in a society which heavily sexualizes young women can also do it.
Being on the hypersexual side of the distribution encourages someone to make themselves desirable and exude confidence, and the attention it brings reinforces that self confidence. Sex repulsion often drives abuse survivors to avoid attracting sexual attention through weight gain and other means.
This is a very common dynamic among trans people, due to being abused at high rates and bombarded with a culture which sexualizes and degrades us.
As one other commenter also notes, the “openness” metric seems mislabeled — the questions are really about self-reported intelligence.
Openness questions might be more like “do you enjoy exploring unusual cultures?” … or “do you enjoy thinking about novel ideas, even if they can lead to unpleasant conclusions?”
I think you should've asked them to take 360 photos of themselves and hire a guy in islamabad to rate all of them
The recurring U-shape might be a response style effect - people who rate themselves as 'average' in looks might just be people who generally see themselves as 'normal' across the board. You mention this possibility in the politics questions but it could hold for others like agreeableness, mental illness, how loving or traditional your family is... This wouldn't explain every pattern, though! I agree that small effect sizes can be very interesting especially in such large datasets.
"This is the openness score, which is the avg of two openness questions - "I have excellent ideas" and "I have difficulty understanding abstract ideas (reversed)”."
Am I missing something, or is this a really bad measure for openness? Especially the latter question, which is basically asking about perceived intelligence.
It seems wrong both intuitively and according to the Big 5 standards, which asks questions to determine: (Ideas (curious); Fantasy (imaginative); Aesthetics (artistic); Actions (wide interests); Feelings (excitable); Values (unconventional/liberal), none of which are linked to "understanding abstract ideas".
So I'd say this graph is actually measuring intelligence + self-confidence.
> Spanking is correlated with class, like lower class families spank more, so maybe this is an artifact of that, but… why are the hottest women reporting an uptick?
There's an ugly interpretation here: Hotter women are often those who spend more time and energy on their appearance, something they do because they were raised harshly, perhaps specifically to keep up appearances as they were taught.
Similarly:
> It’s a bit intuitive that hotter-reporting women are more extroverted; they get more socially rewarded! It’s less intuitive that hotter women are a bit more conscientious. maybe an artifact of less mental illness?
Again, being truly hot takes work. Exercise, makeup, clothes, self-care. So hot women are ipso facto more conscientious than average.
And:
> The hotter the woman, the fewer mental illnesses she selected from the list of mental illnesses… kinda. It’s u-shaped here, which is confusing. Maybe the max hotness option is a weird artifact somehow? Maybe the women who pick being max hot are just straight up insane, but if you’re mid-to-cute you’re not insane? I don’t know. I’m not sure how this makes sense with the rest of the data and I’m curious if you guys have any theories.
Same theory. A woman with good genetics can be reasonably hot with almost no work. But *nobody* gets to super-hot without obsessing over it. And that is often either the cause of, or results in, mental illness.
Oh the other hand, "both the most unattractive and the most attractive categories report the greatest conservatism. I’m so confused." makes sense to me in an intuitive way I can't explain.
Hottest women are drawn to social conservatism because their dating pool for marriage includes the hot rich men who can afford make the lifestyle of a traditional housewife desirable. Uglier women are drawn to social conservatism because they would benefit from a less shallow, more commitment focused dating culture where they know men are less likely to lead them on to use them for sex.
Wait, when you were assessing trans people, was this male to female or female to male transitioners? It's unclear from your phrasing in the post.
Look up the hot-crazy scale. It’s a joke from himym but basically the hotter a girl is the more you’ll put with crazy, but implicitly it also is a cause of the hotness in some sense.
"I’m kinda surprised that autism and schizophrenia are ranked so low."
A couple of suggestions.
The antipsychotic medications often prescribed to those diagnosed with schizophrenia are strongly associated with 'flabby' weight gain (i.e. they make you look both hefty and unhealthy). The effect is rapid. Any woman who has been through the experience of putting on significant weight and looking more unhealthy in a short period of time is unlikely to consider herself hot.
People on the autism spectrum tend to be less influenced by groupthink (e.g. fashion) and less focused on their social presentation, such as how 'hot' they appear to others. That gives them less stake in the question as to whether they're hot and so they'd be less likely to be fooling themselves either positively or negatively about it. If that's true I'd also expect the autistic cohort to exhibit less standard deviation around self-evaluation of how hot they are.
Also a big factor here is that autists tend to invest a lot less in their hotness.
> It’s less intuitive that hotter women are a bit more conscientious. maybe an artifact of less mental illness?
It could just be that low conscientiousness makes you less attractive? You'd exercise less, eat worse food, have less money to spend on beauty.
The bimodal distributions are likely due to the divergent responses to childhood trauma: sex repulsion vs hypersexuality. The two lead to actively trying to be less or more attractive, to avoid or obtain sexual attention. These are also very prevalent dynamics among trans men and women, due to very high rates of childhood abuse.
Very plausible. There's also an (equally ugly) explanation with the opposite causality: the ugliest girls are more likely to have parents who are more disappointed in them and thus were more likely to beat them, while the prettiest girls are more likely to have had bare-bottom spankings from an abusive daddy.
I suggest doing plots like the "weight vs hotness" as "BMI vs hotness", since you have the height data anyway.
I'd like to see the correlation with age - I expect older women to report being less hot, and also more spanked for instance
You repeated a chart after "Hotter women feel more powerful"
And the last sentence in the intro says ''we’d fine'' instead of ''we'd find''.
Boosting this out of love
"Hotness" is presumably very evolutionarily advantageous. We might therefore expect that there are few variables that reliably increase it. (The reverse applies also to "ugliness").
However there may still be variables that increase variance.
We might therefore be seeing that ugliness and hotness are caused by shared characteristics which increase variance along this dimension, but which correlate more straightforwardly with other variables.
I think this is mostly a measure of self-esteem. Consider the questions for openness (“I have great ideas”, “I have trouble understanding complex ideas”) - IMO these measure inflated self-esteem way more than they measure openness. Same for IQ and lots of other stuff. All in all I don’t think this questionnaire was very informative.
> Mid women got spanked less and have more loving families
I think what you're likely seeing is the divergent sexual response to childhood trauma: sex repulsion vs hypersexuality. These are most common with sexual trauma, but emotional trauma in a society which heavily sexualizes young women can also do it.
Being on the hypersexual side of the distribution encourages someone to make themselves desirable and exude confidence, and the attention it brings reinforces that self confidence. Sex repulsion often drives abuse survivors to avoid attracting sexual attention through weight gain and other means.
This is a very common dynamic among trans people, due to being abused at high rates and bombarded with a culture which sexualizes and degrades us.
Super interesting!
As one other commenter also notes, the “openness” metric seems mislabeled — the questions are really about self-reported intelligence.
Openness questions might be more like “do you enjoy exploring unusual cultures?” … or “do you enjoy thinking about novel ideas, even if they can lead to unpleasant conclusions?”