Most males are “ugly” at a first glance, without any context to who they are, my guess is because male strangers represent a potential evolutionary threat, both to men and women.
I could be wrong, but Id wager the “familiarity boost” in attractiveness is higher for men than for women. This could be tested by comparing how women would rate their close male friends and relatives and how that compares to rating from strangers.
If true, this may factor into why women rate men less attractive on average, and why men’s self rating is so off.
Something to think about is the medium of comparions: pictures. pictures may just make everyone look “ugly”, because of how impersonal they are. Even if asked to rate purely physically, People would probably rate someone lower from a picture, but a bit higher after just 5-10 minutes of interacting with them. This disparity may reflect in the higher self ratings (because everyone knows themaelves) and the lower stranger ratings (both direct and via comparison to self).
Some additional thoughts:
1. while everyone is naturally ‘delusional’, social media probably makes women more humble due to the constant comparisons.
2. men are probably wired to be over-confident in their appearance because confidence is sexy.
" is because male strangers represent a potential evolutionary threat"
Or more simple: We live in a society where men take less care of their appearance than women. No make up, no skin routine, no touch up (of their eyebrows, nails and such), less fashionable in general, less cosmetic surgery, less toning exercise, etc.
When men approach me on the street to ask me out, try to strike up conversation, tell me I look good, tell me to smile, or say something vulgar, I realize I spend zero time rating their attractiveness and 100% of the time divining how big of a threat they are to me.
I’m sure this contributes at least a little bit, but then again “This suggests that a third of people are actually doing damage to their attractiveness when they try to look hot.”
I have been told I am the "handsome" brother and it's really only because I have a really basic skincare routine (you just need sunscreen every day, maybe retinol guys), am skinnier, and have a passable sense of fashion. My brother is taller, stronger, & younger, he could be the handsome one no sweat.
Maybe it's that I have a condition that stops me from drinking as much, too. I've noticed that colleagues and people that don't drink in general look younger, including people who aren't really health oriented.
3: I theorize the “familiarity boost” is probably higher for ugly people. sub-5 strangers probably shift slightly toward a 5 after knowing them for some time. Potentially factoring into the higher delusion gap for ugly people.
This tracks with my experience. I very rarely actually see someone I would consider "ugly", instead I think of them as plain. A good personality overcomes a plain countenance with ease
I think with men especially how one carries oneself is just a much larger variable than it is for women. I remember in high school/college knowing nerdy guys who had model-esque faces but zero confidence/'presence' and got little notice, whereas average guys with swagger/charisma got plenty of female attention . .but from a straight picture test, the geeky guy would've likely won hands down.
This is an under-appreciated post. Men with gravitas (or being higher on the socio-sexual hierarchy) can overcome simple photo-to-photo comparisons in their daily lives via the respect and deference from men around them and the intrigue by women (as well as their noticing of the hierarchy demonstrated by men).
Consider a very handsome photo of a man (hot desired genetics), then in person he has a high pitched voice and nervous disposition (twink? mental issues?). I think it would be fair to guess that their attractiveness would plummet among both sexes with that additional data.
Likewise with the 'delusional and unattractive' successful man on the boat. He likely overcame his low superficial photo-op grading by building something that adds an aura of attraction that isn't capable of being recognized (or even rejected as a poser/try-hard) in a mere photo. And I don't just mean money.
There's also the case of a hot person who is constantly single or runs through partners versus one who is 'the harder catch' but in a solid relationship. Bonus points if the partner is hot.
Perhaps the real issue is that the dataset results should be defined as mere photo-attractiveness (or photo-hot) for clarity.
why do gay men rate men so highly then? I’m a below average looking guy so no women find me physically attractive. I can get on Grindr and find 100 guys within a week
Zero knowledge on this but so many factors contribute id say i agree and would like to consider a couple things. if you want genetics, we have one X and one y. y male attractiveness traits have no "double Y " backup, same for X. contributes to larger tails in male genetics (not just attractiveness) if these chromosomes play an outsize role in the trait. not that genes are everything. If you want social standard of attractiveness, I doubt its a "brain state" or judgement, in the same way that you'd say color blue is blue. ie subjective, yet variance in consensus changes depending on some social selection pressure. i heard for example trends in birth control and hard economic times push the male standard toward "provider". I I suspect male standards for beauty skew in other ways, chopping off the left tail and reinforcing the "all or none." Plus men less valued by appearance so I *guess* that an onlooker would probably want to rate a man ugly to get at whether theyre "productive" or not.
Have you tried incorporating variance into the analysis? Imagine someone whose average rating is 5, but who gets voted 0 by half the people and 10 by the other half. That person will get lots of enthusiastic attention, so they're (legitimately) likely to rate themselves higher than a 5.
Yeah, I think that's an important thing to remember for using dating apps. It doesn't matter whether the average person thinks you're a 4 or a 6, you're looking for *one* person who really, really likes you.
Agreed. All due respect to the ladies involved, but the woman rated as most attractive in this survey was surprisingly "mid and inoffensive". I can imagine a subset of people rating the green hair/pixie cut girl much higher (I would), but the "attractive = long, blonde hair" subset of respondents drags her down.
This taught me that the way I use the 1-10 scale is completely different from how your sample (and thus everyone else?) uses it.
I would be *very* adverse to giving someone a 5 or below - it would feel mean! I would assume that 4 is completely unfuckable, 1 is reserved for burn victims. So the prevalence of 3s completely shocks me! I would probably get a 3 based on your provided pics so what a blackpill.
Agree, I think these ratings are insane. No one even got a 7 or above, that's just stupid. In my mind, I take a stadium of people in line them up from most to least attractive, then split it into deciles and those are your ratings. 10% should be 9s and above, 10% should be 1s and below, and anyone 3 and under is totally unfuckable by anyone. These scales are stupid.
This doesn't make any sense. Attractiveness is distrubuted on a bell curve (like most human traits). If you think that there are just as many 6s as 10s then you have no idea how men usually use the rating system.
Yes I do understand how they're doing it, and it's stupid. What the point is their stupid system if no one is a 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, or 10? And yet 90% of people eventually pair up with a relatively looks-matched person, so obviously people DO perceive the actual ranking, it just doesn't fit your internet-brain system. And if you went 100 years ago, literally no woman would be above a 4 in this system, so it's stupid. It should reflect actual reality, where if you take 1,000 people, it would not be very hard to get basic consensus on how to line then up from most to least attractive, and you can easily split it into tenths. Most people would prefer to be with someone in the top 10% to the bottom. Always relative to the actual pool, if you want to insist on some objective ranking you can but it doesn't reflect how anyone actually acts in real life, thus making it entirely un-useful as an objective system.
I disagree. The 1-10 attractiveness scale is more like Olympic scoring (or like Olympic scoring ideally should be, without score inflation, country bias, etc.) wherein a perfect 10 is rare to the point of being almost unobtainable. A 10 is a platonic ideal of flawlessness against which all else is measured. Calling someone a 10 means you cannot imagine anything that would make that person more attractive. A 10 is not only objectively flawless but also fits whatever type is uniquely beautiful and sexy to you.
Breaking down 1,000 people into 10ths would mean putting the one supermodel-hot person in the same bucket as people who are just cute. And on the other end, putting people with unpleasing features in the same bucket as people who are hideously deformed, scarred,, toothless and decrepit, etc. Or like putting someone with an IQ of 200 in the same bucket as the 130-140s. Bell curves with long tails exist for a reason.
I think it's exactly the opposite. I can easily pull out my high school yearbook and sort people into deciles that no one would have major arguments with. If they did, it would not be about moving them up or down by more than one decile. And there are not vastly mixed people in any bucket, they'd all look roughly the same on attractiveness level. Your system results in everyone being bunched in the middle, which like I said is useless information. Going back to the high school example, there no way a person in the 81-90th percentile is going to prom with someone at the 45th the 55th percentile. In your system they'd all be similarly scored so whats the point of your system exactly? We all know there's a huge difference between a Miami 9 and an Omaha 9. In your system they'd both be 5.2s so that gives you zero information. I'm not surprised that her question asking about relative rank (or were other people more or less hot) resulted in far more realistic responses, because that is how people actually use the idea of "rating" for actual life. What purpose does your system serve? I can't think of one.
Ok, I sort of see where you are coming from. If you're trying to figure out who in a high school is on par with who, then your system has utility. In my system there are almost certainly no 10s, 9s, 1s, or 2s in any given high school, so you don't really need the long tails my system accounts for.
My system has utility for talking about why Leonardo DiCaprio is dating who he's dating rather than someone from your high school. Or explaining to a friend why you were so nervous approaching a particular girl ("She was a 9, man, I was shaking.") Or why you are so hung up on a particular ex ("she was so beautiful and just my type, she was a 10 to me"), or why you put up with crazy behavior from a particular girl, etc. Or for rating celebrities ("I don't know why everyone is so hung up on Scarlett Johansson, to me she's like an 8.")
I messed around on the attractiveness rating site Hot or Not for a little while. My personal rating system there started with the premise that the question being asked was whether a girl was hot, not whether she was ok. You had to be at least somewhat hot to score over the midpoint. So a 6 was someone I would sleep with. A 5 was someone I wouldn't, but I don't mind having her at the party or whatever. 4 and below were various levels of egregiousness. 7 was pretty darn attractive, you'd feel lucky if she were your girlfriend. 8 was exceptional, the prettiest girl you are practically likely to see in real life. 9 meant she almost certainly was a model or otherwise hot enough to make a living based on her looks. And 10 was the theoretical maximum--not just a model but a perfect-looking model who was also my type. I think this is a lot closer to how men use this scale in real life than your version (regardless of which system you think is more useful).
In fact, I would say your system breaks down pretty quickly. If you put me in a room with 10 random women, there's a good chance I won't be strongly attracted to any of them. Under your system that would mean I am turning up my nose at 9s and 10s. That's an absurd result.
A bell curve distribution makes most sense because there will be lower variability in physical traits deemed attractive at the extreme i.e. to be a 9 you need to be beautiful and a near perfect physique whereas someone who is beautiful and has an average physique is most likely a 7 and in the same part of the curve as someone with an average face and great physique.
Female 6s are one of the largest groups and primary target for most female coded media and occupy something like the 65tg to 90th percentile. 6s have relatively high variability, possessing at least a few more attractive traits but are otherwise somewhat average. They will have plenty of dating options but are often insecure about their less attractive traits and competition from more attractive females. And finally, no aspiring young woman wants to be less than a 6.
The stadium analogy you’re using assumes a uniform distribution, where each rating from 1 to 10 gets 10% of the population. That’s not how the rating system works—it follows a normal distribution, where most people cluster around the average, and the numbers taper off at the extremes. Here’s why the math doesn’t hold up:
60% of people are rated between 4 and 6, not 10% per rating as a uniform split would suggest. The majority pile up in the middle.
Only about 1.1% fall between 8 and 9, and even fewer reach 9 to 10. The same goes for the low end—1s and 2s are rare, not 10% each.
A rating of 3 sits within the second standard deviation, which covers 30.8% of the population (15.4% on each side of the mean). It’s far from an extreme or rare score.
Your assumption of an even 10% per decile doesn’t match the reality of a normal curve. The extremes are much less populated than you’re picturing.
What do you mean that's not how "the" rating system works? You mean that's not how YOUR rating system works. Her survey did not include rules for the rating system or level-setting. My rating system, and the systems of many of the other people commenting here, is not how yours works because yours is a curve. Mine is not a curve. You do realize that not all distributions are curves, don't you? Many are, and some aren't. I think a curved system to rank attractiveness is silly bc the only reason to even use a rank is to know who you match up with. Most people don't want to match up with someone in a lower decile, they want someone equal or above, so most go with equal. And that is how it actually works in the real world, where almost all couples are roughly matched, using my system. Your system, which you seem to think is some objective rule of the universe, does not result in any useful data that is applicable for real life, and therefore I think it's a silly system. The only thing it is useful for is telling you how far away someone is from an impossible platonic ideal in your head, and I have no idea why you would want a system that serves that purpose, or what benefit it would provide, unless you just enjoy constantly being able to measure exactly how far from an imaginary idea everyone is.
I think people are way too stingy and "average" with their ratings! All of the photos you showed are above-average. They're young, slender, clean-cut, good skin, good hair, everything people like. Especially the woman you said was a "7.1," I'd say she's a straight-up 10, and if she went on a date with me I'd be nervously thinking "there's no way a woman this hot is interested in a guy like me."
If you want to see the real bottom of the scale, get off the internet and go to public places. I went to a big park the other day on a warm day. Lots of old people. They had wrinkles, scars, and age spots. The men were almost all bald. The women's fashion sense was... incomprehensible. Many were using canes, walkers, or wheelchairs.
But you know what? They're still people. Many of them were with a partner. I saw a couple dancing. They still have a sense of sexuality. It's actually a real problem that people in nursing homes are spreading STDs to each other. Now *that's* what someone on the low end of the scale looks like!
Agreed. I don't think she's a 10, she looks a bit basic/simple amongst other things, but a good 9.The guy is stunning! Close to a 10 I would say. And he got a 6.5? What is going on
I have some questions about these voted average results. What do people these think the average person looks like? In the US 70% of the population is overweight to name one thing. Half of the population is over 42. From these results I have more believe in peoples self assessment now.
I wonder how these numbers are shifted by the proliferation of images of very hot people we're bombarded with every day. I would love to see how this survey would look if it include images of eg. Influencers and facetuned / photoshopped images, images of models in advertising, like those we see constantly.
- A person's attractiveness is determined by more than their face (I *think* this point is uncontroversial)
- Therefore, when considering how hot someone is in real life, a rater will consider the whole of a person (body, dress, facial expression, posture, vibe, etc), while when rating a photo they can only use a small fraction of that information. Call this Wholistic Mode vs. Face Mode rating.
- This feels true of me, and I'm specualting that it's true many others: *any* person will be rated several points higher in Wholistic Mode than in Face Mode.
- When you're asked to rate yourself, you rate yourself in Wholistic Mode by default.
- You asked in the survey that people guess what other people would rate their *photo*, but I kind of doubt most people are very good at modeling that compared to "how would another person looking at me rate me."
- This sort of thing could plausibly explain some fraction of the discrepancy between self and others' ratings
Second, some notes on my internal experience taking the above survey (as a rater only, not a face submitter). The survey failed to capture how I consider a person's attractiveness, in a way that feels consitent with the highest rated woman's photo being a 7.1. If many other people are similar to me in some of these ways, that might be informative?
- To reiterate above, a person's attractiveness is determined by more than their face
- Face alone is a low enough fraction of total attractiveness that rating a face feels kind of fake. Kind of like being asked to rate how "athletic" someone looks by a picture of their shadow.
- "Hot" and "Attractive" are used kind of interchangeably in this post? A face can be attractive even if that attractiveness could be very different from the person's. Asking if a face is "hot" is a type error.
- Even with just a single picture of a face, the person's *expression* in that picture plays a bigger role in their attractiveness than most actual features of their face. Like if could somehow get me to independently rate two pictures of the same person, one smiling and one not, I predict the smile would rate 2 points higher by default.
- You could *maybe* get a signal for the above thought using your existing data by clustering photos into "smiling" and "not smiling" and seeing if there's a noticeable difference? Especially if there are enough submitters who had different expressions in the "best" and "average"
Don't know if any of the above is useful to you, but I'll stop rambling now. In any case, it's always fun to see what data comes out of your surveys!
I’ve always felt I’m terrible at selfies. I’m not sure if it’s true that some people’s attractiveness translates to the camera better than others, but if it is true I suspect I may be one of those people who looks better in person. I think I’m reasonably handsome, but when I try to take a picture of myself I look like a dirty pencil eraser trying to smile. It’s also possible I just haven’t gotten the hang of selfies. Depressing if so; I’ve put significant time into it. 😂 Or I guess the third possible explanation is I really do look like that and I have that irrational confidence you mentioned many men seem to have (how dare you suggest that lol). 😝
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is I wonder if the camera thing factors in here? I wonder if there are some people who maybe in person are closer to as attractive as they think they are than the study suggested others perceive them as, but because for whatever reason their hotness didn’t translate to their pictures the data got skewed? Just a random thought.
I’m also inclined to agree with one of your other commenters about men and confidence. We are socialized to present with confidence as it makes us more attractive. For me I’ve taken it a step further and made an effort to internalize a high sense of self-esteem so that it doesn’t feel like an act. It’s true that I feel more attractive than I did as a younger man, though it may well be the case that speaking strictly on a physical level the opposite is the case. Like, it seems unlikely that, all other things being equal, I’m physically hotter at 46 than I was at 26. Yet I definitely think I’m hotter overall, and the results of my dating life suggest others see it that way too.
One thing this post usefully helped me realize is that when I assign a rating to myself, there's an implicit "among people who go for that kind of thing'. If you simply prefix the question with something like "the raters will be randomly drawn from the opposite sex population" I guess I'd expect my number to drop by due to three points, which seems to be more or less what happens - I actually expect this effect is a bit weaker in your sample due to it being relatively homogeneous!
I feel like it should go without saying that you can’t draw conclusions about actual people based on how attractive people rate an animated character...
You keep using the word "delusional". What if it's the mere familiarity effect? The more you see your own face in the mirror, the more familiar it becomes, the more you like it. That would be a whitepill because it suggests that friends find you hotter than strangers.
Men's attraction to women is strongly aesthetic. Besides some particular genres or fetishes, most pretty women are pretty in the same way a cathedral is pretty. Objectively, soul enlighteningly pretty. Women's attraction to men is a lot more nebulous. A lot of women are attracted to strength, popularity, or comedic skill, which you'll obviously never see in a photo. Also since these are photos of faces they don't really show height or musculature, which are also important for men on the dating market.
Idk if it’s just because they are mostly too old for the Snapchat era, but the men seemed to really suck at taking pictures of themselves compared to the women. Like bad angles, lighting, etc.
Why not distinguish between faces and bodies? Some of us are decent looking facially but are in extraordinarily good shape. In real life, people see both.
Bingo, it's what makes Chuukese extremely attractive to most men. They aren't beautiful but they way they walked coupled with their generic proportions ...
You can often know long before you make out the details of a persons face, a lot about them by their gait. It's something poor men leaned long ago with "swagger".
Curious about the age of the responders. I'm a male in my 60's and I'd find it hard to even guess at my attractiveness now. I'd probably be a 0 to any young woman and anything from 4 to 7 :-) to an "older" woman.
The most interesting to me is people basically rate from 3 to 6. So it's more like a 4-star system.
This seems wild to me. I'd have been curious if they would ever give a 9 ? Maybe slipping some model photos (but not famous) in the mix to check ?
A few years back I used PhotoFeeler to get a sense of my best pictures fro dating, and also to have a more objective number. I was pleasantly surprised as I thought myself as a 6 and got 7 or even close to 8 on my best photo.
As I'm far from being very attractive, it makes me think people in your survey didn't rate the same way that people on PhotoFeeler did. I'm not sure why though. Do you have a hypothesis ?
Assuming attractiveness follows a bell curve, it’s not really surprising that most fall in the middle. My intuition is that 10’s (which are effectively being called 9’s here) are exceptionally rare, like one in a few thousand. So it’s not surprising such a small sample doesn’t have any.
I get what you say about 10s, but if we assume a bell curve with similar standard deviation and mean as IQ, we get these percentages :
10 : 0.0031%
9 : 0.1318%
8 : 2.14%
7 : 13.59%
So in this sample, there should be several people above 6. Especially because we can assume than the subset of responders is more attractive than average (beauty is helped quite a bit by money, and they're basically all educated).
That’s about what I would expect for 9’s and 10’s at least. Are there not several above 6 in this dataset? I didn’t look at the raw data but I think she mentioned a few.
But it's not a bell curves, because people just match up according to where they fall relatively. Every man or every woman could suddenly become far less attractive and it would make no difference in how people pair up because they're all just going by relative spot in line. So using a bell curve makes no sense. Regardless of how "objectively" attractive they are, 10% of men and women are always going to be more attractive than the other 90%, so they, should be 9s and above. Bc let's be honest, who you can get with is the only reason this even matter at all.
People have always paired up no matter how ugly or attractive they are, they just adjust by the pool available. 100 years ago women were far less attractive and ones considered beauty queens then would be 3s today. Yet they all had no problem finding partners. And even today, the highest marriage rates are the places where people are the ugliest (like Arkansas and Alaska), there's no correlation with attractiveness, people just adjust and match on relative rank according to the pool. People aren't getting together today because entertainment, ease, and comfort sitting home and doing nothing is so much higher than in the past, it's just not as unpleasant to be single.
Well said. Until VERY recently, most perspectives on attraction, hierarchy, and practicality (i.e., worthy of long term commitment) were fairly local. Small pond.
In the modern context, particularly with dating apps, the field has grown to global proportions and gamified to absurdity. Big (and increasingly fake or gamed) pond.
I’d rather not make this about gender but I think there’s a meaningful distinction to be made here. Women generally choose to pair up when they can (just look at childlessness rates over time), but a substantial portion of men [have always] lived their lives alone. I’m one of the guys who could probably get laid pretty easily if that was all I was after, but can’t land a relationship with the girls I’m attracted to for more than just sex, so I’ve more or less opted out of the whole thing.
Are alternative forms of entertainment a factor? Sure, I’ll admit to that, but also the level of attraction I feel towards certain women is also definitely definitely definitely a factor. Guys can’t really fake attraction, in the end it either works or it doesn’t.
To say that attractiveness only matters on a relative scale, not absolute, I bet that’s true for less than half the population.
If by “attractive” you mean something like “their sum total valuation as a human, averaged across all judges” I would pretty much agree with you (although I think there’s way more variation in personal preference than you imply).
Strictly physical attractiveness though? Nah, I think it’s pretty much a bell curve.
There is variation sure, but if you took a large enough sample of the full spectrum of actual humans, I don't think it would be that hard to get basic consensus as far as who was in the top 10%, next 10% etc. For one thing, these pics only took the most attractive people to begin with because they're all young and not obese. If you included everyone, they would probably all be in the top 30% just right there. Even if you limited it more, I still think it would not be THAT difficult to get basic consensus on just physical traits, at least in deciles.
For only physical attractiveness, just trying to narrow it down to deciles, yeah absolutely, agree 100%. Where it breaks down for me is thinking that most people are choosing based on rank rather than more individualized personal preference.
At the risk of exposing myself as a deplorable sexist, I think the average man’s calculation would be something like: 50% binary does my dick get hard for her; 25% attractiveness rating on a 1-10 scale; and 25% personality match. Whereas for women I would guess it’s something like 50% binary do my friends approve; 20% income; 20% personality match; 10% attractiveness rating on a 1-10 scale. I just pulled this out of my ass so I’m definitely open to feedback, but to act like it’s the same for men and women seems blatantly absurd.
Can't really speak to that because every female friend I've ever had my whole life from elementary school through my 30s very much cared about male appearance as probably the number one factor, then personality and income basically not at all. So I never know where these ideas come from bc they don't match my own observations. But maybe that's just the places I've lived and people I've known. I almost never see a couple that isn't very "looks matched" as they say, and it stands out to the point that it makes people comment and think it's strange when you see one that's not.
But it does seem that in certain large and very high COL cities like NYC, people are way more focused on income than regular places and I never lived in a huge city, so more hot woman rich man pairings seem to happen in those places. Also, when Aella did her orgy, she had a big questionnaire with qualifications she used to pare down the applications but she did NOT filter based on looks at all. Which I found stunningly bizarre! I asked her about it and she didn't care about the that, which I can't relate to at all, so who knows.
I'd say I'm more like you in that if I couldn't get a guy I thought was actually good looking is just rather be alone. But I think that's more superficial than most people. Go out to the beach or a theme park or sporting event and you will see all kinds of big fat ugly people paired up all around you, the vast majority of people do eventually settle at their level and settle down.
Most males are “ugly” at a first glance, without any context to who they are, my guess is because male strangers represent a potential evolutionary threat, both to men and women.
I could be wrong, but Id wager the “familiarity boost” in attractiveness is higher for men than for women. This could be tested by comparing how women would rate their close male friends and relatives and how that compares to rating from strangers.
If true, this may factor into why women rate men less attractive on average, and why men’s self rating is so off.
Something to think about is the medium of comparions: pictures. pictures may just make everyone look “ugly”, because of how impersonal they are. Even if asked to rate purely physically, People would probably rate someone lower from a picture, but a bit higher after just 5-10 minutes of interacting with them. This disparity may reflect in the higher self ratings (because everyone knows themaelves) and the lower stranger ratings (both direct and via comparison to self).
Some additional thoughts:
1. while everyone is naturally ‘delusional’, social media probably makes women more humble due to the constant comparisons.
2. men are probably wired to be over-confident in their appearance because confidence is sexy.
" is because male strangers represent a potential evolutionary threat"
Or more simple: We live in a society where men take less care of their appearance than women. No make up, no skin routine, no touch up (of their eyebrows, nails and such), less fashionable in general, less cosmetic surgery, less toning exercise, etc.
Both can be true.
When men approach me on the street to ask me out, try to strike up conversation, tell me I look good, tell me to smile, or say something vulgar, I realize I spend zero time rating their attractiveness and 100% of the time divining how big of a threat they are to me.
I’m sure this contributes at least a little bit, but then again “This suggests that a third of people are actually doing damage to their attractiveness when they try to look hot.”
I have been told I am the "handsome" brother and it's really only because I have a really basic skincare routine (you just need sunscreen every day, maybe retinol guys), am skinnier, and have a passable sense of fashion. My brother is taller, stronger, & younger, he could be the handsome one no sweat.
Maybe it's that I have a condition that stops me from drinking as much, too. I've noticed that colleagues and people that don't drink in general look younger, including people who aren't really health oriented.
How do women who look like shit get 100s of offers to fuck on dating apps?
Supply and demand. There are 15 times more men than women on apps.
No. Tinder has 30:70 ratio
It’s imbalanced but not by that much
You’re right, that seems more sensible on second thought.
3: I theorize the “familiarity boost” is probably higher for ugly people. sub-5 strangers probably shift slightly toward a 5 after knowing them for some time. Potentially factoring into the higher delusion gap for ugly people.
This tracks with my experience. I very rarely actually see someone I would consider "ugly", instead I think of them as plain. A good personality overcomes a plain countenance with ease
I think with men especially how one carries oneself is just a much larger variable than it is for women. I remember in high school/college knowing nerdy guys who had model-esque faces but zero confidence/'presence' and got little notice, whereas average guys with swagger/charisma got plenty of female attention . .but from a straight picture test, the geeky guy would've likely won hands down.
This is an under-appreciated post. Men with gravitas (or being higher on the socio-sexual hierarchy) can overcome simple photo-to-photo comparisons in their daily lives via the respect and deference from men around them and the intrigue by women (as well as their noticing of the hierarchy demonstrated by men).
Consider a very handsome photo of a man (hot desired genetics), then in person he has a high pitched voice and nervous disposition (twink? mental issues?). I think it would be fair to guess that their attractiveness would plummet among both sexes with that additional data.
Likewise with the 'delusional and unattractive' successful man on the boat. He likely overcame his low superficial photo-op grading by building something that adds an aura of attraction that isn't capable of being recognized (or even rejected as a poser/try-hard) in a mere photo. And I don't just mean money.
There's also the case of a hot person who is constantly single or runs through partners versus one who is 'the harder catch' but in a solid relationship. Bonus points if the partner is hot.
Perhaps the real issue is that the dataset results should be defined as mere photo-attractiveness (or photo-hot) for clarity.
why do gay men rate men so highly then? I’m a below average looking guy so no women find me physically attractive. I can get on Grindr and find 100 guys within a week
Women neither like sex nor relationships, men do hence your results.
Zero knowledge on this but so many factors contribute id say i agree and would like to consider a couple things. if you want genetics, we have one X and one y. y male attractiveness traits have no "double Y " backup, same for X. contributes to larger tails in male genetics (not just attractiveness) if these chromosomes play an outsize role in the trait. not that genes are everything. If you want social standard of attractiveness, I doubt its a "brain state" or judgement, in the same way that you'd say color blue is blue. ie subjective, yet variance in consensus changes depending on some social selection pressure. i heard for example trends in birth control and hard economic times push the male standard toward "provider". I I suspect male standards for beauty skew in other ways, chopping off the left tail and reinforcing the "all or none." Plus men less valued by appearance so I *guess* that an onlooker would probably want to rate a man ugly to get at whether theyre "productive" or not.
Have you tried incorporating variance into the analysis? Imagine someone whose average rating is 5, but who gets voted 0 by half the people and 10 by the other half. That person will get lots of enthusiastic attention, so they're (legitimately) likely to rate themselves higher than a 5.
Yeah, I think that's an important thing to remember for using dating apps. It doesn't matter whether the average person thinks you're a 4 or a 6, you're looking for *one* person who really, really likes you.
Agreed. All due respect to the ladies involved, but the woman rated as most attractive in this survey was surprisingly "mid and inoffensive". I can imagine a subset of people rating the green hair/pixie cut girl much higher (I would), but the "attractive = long, blonde hair" subset of respondents drags her down.
Oh yeah! Given a self-rating of n, how many partners rate you >n? Could call that "chance", I guess.
Yes that'd be a good chart! Also, plot self-rating - others-rating VS variance.
This taught me that the way I use the 1-10 scale is completely different from how your sample (and thus everyone else?) uses it.
I would be *very* adverse to giving someone a 5 or below - it would feel mean! I would assume that 4 is completely unfuckable, 1 is reserved for burn victims. So the prevalence of 3s completely shocks me! I would probably get a 3 based on your provided pics so what a blackpill.
Agree, I think these ratings are insane. No one even got a 7 or above, that's just stupid. In my mind, I take a stadium of people in line them up from most to least attractive, then split it into deciles and those are your ratings. 10% should be 9s and above, 10% should be 1s and below, and anyone 3 and under is totally unfuckable by anyone. These scales are stupid.
This doesn't make any sense. Attractiveness is distrubuted on a bell curve (like most human traits). If you think that there are just as many 6s as 10s then you have no idea how men usually use the rating system.
Yes I do understand how they're doing it, and it's stupid. What the point is their stupid system if no one is a 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, or 10? And yet 90% of people eventually pair up with a relatively looks-matched person, so obviously people DO perceive the actual ranking, it just doesn't fit your internet-brain system. And if you went 100 years ago, literally no woman would be above a 4 in this system, so it's stupid. It should reflect actual reality, where if you take 1,000 people, it would not be very hard to get basic consensus on how to line then up from most to least attractive, and you can easily split it into tenths. Most people would prefer to be with someone in the top 10% to the bottom. Always relative to the actual pool, if you want to insist on some objective ranking you can but it doesn't reflect how anyone actually acts in real life, thus making it entirely un-useful as an objective system.
I disagree. The 1-10 attractiveness scale is more like Olympic scoring (or like Olympic scoring ideally should be, without score inflation, country bias, etc.) wherein a perfect 10 is rare to the point of being almost unobtainable. A 10 is a platonic ideal of flawlessness against which all else is measured. Calling someone a 10 means you cannot imagine anything that would make that person more attractive. A 10 is not only objectively flawless but also fits whatever type is uniquely beautiful and sexy to you.
Breaking down 1,000 people into 10ths would mean putting the one supermodel-hot person in the same bucket as people who are just cute. And on the other end, putting people with unpleasing features in the same bucket as people who are hideously deformed, scarred,, toothless and decrepit, etc. Or like putting someone with an IQ of 200 in the same bucket as the 130-140s. Bell curves with long tails exist for a reason.
I think it's exactly the opposite. I can easily pull out my high school yearbook and sort people into deciles that no one would have major arguments with. If they did, it would not be about moving them up or down by more than one decile. And there are not vastly mixed people in any bucket, they'd all look roughly the same on attractiveness level. Your system results in everyone being bunched in the middle, which like I said is useless information. Going back to the high school example, there no way a person in the 81-90th percentile is going to prom with someone at the 45th the 55th percentile. In your system they'd all be similarly scored so whats the point of your system exactly? We all know there's a huge difference between a Miami 9 and an Omaha 9. In your system they'd both be 5.2s so that gives you zero information. I'm not surprised that her question asking about relative rank (or were other people more or less hot) resulted in far more realistic responses, because that is how people actually use the idea of "rating" for actual life. What purpose does your system serve? I can't think of one.
Ok, I sort of see where you are coming from. If you're trying to figure out who in a high school is on par with who, then your system has utility. In my system there are almost certainly no 10s, 9s, 1s, or 2s in any given high school, so you don't really need the long tails my system accounts for.
My system has utility for talking about why Leonardo DiCaprio is dating who he's dating rather than someone from your high school. Or explaining to a friend why you were so nervous approaching a particular girl ("She was a 9, man, I was shaking.") Or why you are so hung up on a particular ex ("she was so beautiful and just my type, she was a 10 to me"), or why you put up with crazy behavior from a particular girl, etc. Or for rating celebrities ("I don't know why everyone is so hung up on Scarlett Johansson, to me she's like an 8.")
I messed around on the attractiveness rating site Hot or Not for a little while. My personal rating system there started with the premise that the question being asked was whether a girl was hot, not whether she was ok. You had to be at least somewhat hot to score over the midpoint. So a 6 was someone I would sleep with. A 5 was someone I wouldn't, but I don't mind having her at the party or whatever. 4 and below were various levels of egregiousness. 7 was pretty darn attractive, you'd feel lucky if she were your girlfriend. 8 was exceptional, the prettiest girl you are practically likely to see in real life. 9 meant she almost certainly was a model or otherwise hot enough to make a living based on her looks. And 10 was the theoretical maximum--not just a model but a perfect-looking model who was also my type. I think this is a lot closer to how men use this scale in real life than your version (regardless of which system you think is more useful).
In fact, I would say your system breaks down pretty quickly. If you put me in a room with 10 random women, there's a good chance I won't be strongly attracted to any of them. Under your system that would mean I am turning up my nose at 9s and 10s. That's an absurd result.
A bell curve distribution makes most sense because there will be lower variability in physical traits deemed attractive at the extreme i.e. to be a 9 you need to be beautiful and a near perfect physique whereas someone who is beautiful and has an average physique is most likely a 7 and in the same part of the curve as someone with an average face and great physique.
Female 6s are one of the largest groups and primary target for most female coded media and occupy something like the 65tg to 90th percentile. 6s have relatively high variability, possessing at least a few more attractive traits but are otherwise somewhat average. They will have plenty of dating options but are often insecure about their less attractive traits and competition from more attractive females. And finally, no aspiring young woman wants to be less than a 6.
A 9/10 is Irina Shayak, an 8/10 Margot Robbie , a 7.5 /10 Dua Lipa
The stadium analogy you’re using assumes a uniform distribution, where each rating from 1 to 10 gets 10% of the population. That’s not how the rating system works—it follows a normal distribution, where most people cluster around the average, and the numbers taper off at the extremes. Here’s why the math doesn’t hold up:
60% of people are rated between 4 and 6, not 10% per rating as a uniform split would suggest. The majority pile up in the middle.
Only about 1.1% fall between 8 and 9, and even fewer reach 9 to 10. The same goes for the low end—1s and 2s are rare, not 10% each.
A rating of 3 sits within the second standard deviation, which covers 30.8% of the population (15.4% on each side of the mean). It’s far from an extreme or rare score.
Your assumption of an even 10% per decile doesn’t match the reality of a normal curve. The extremes are much less populated than you’re picturing.
Rating 1: 0.16% (160 people)
Rating 2: 1.63% (1,630 people)
Rating 3: 8.59% (8,590 people)
Rating 4: 23.34% (23,340 people)
Rating 5: 32.56% (32,560 people)
Rating 6: 23.34% (23,340 people)
Rating 7: 8.59% (8,590 people)
Rating 8: 1.63% (1,630 people)
Rating 9: 0.152% (152 people)
Rating 10: 0.008% (8 people)
What do you mean that's not how "the" rating system works? You mean that's not how YOUR rating system works. Her survey did not include rules for the rating system or level-setting. My rating system, and the systems of many of the other people commenting here, is not how yours works because yours is a curve. Mine is not a curve. You do realize that not all distributions are curves, don't you? Many are, and some aren't. I think a curved system to rank attractiveness is silly bc the only reason to even use a rank is to know who you match up with. Most people don't want to match up with someone in a lower decile, they want someone equal or above, so most go with equal. And that is how it actually works in the real world, where almost all couples are roughly matched, using my system. Your system, which you seem to think is some objective rule of the universe, does not result in any useful data that is applicable for real life, and therefore I think it's a silly system. The only thing it is useful for is telling you how far away someone is from an impossible platonic ideal in your head, and I have no idea why you would want a system that serves that purpose, or what benefit it would provide, unless you just enjoy constantly being able to measure exactly how far from an imaginary idea everyone is.
I wonder whether priming people with the infamous 4chan attractiveness chart would shift answers up a bit.
I was going to say, I can't be this wrong. I fully learned that *everyone* did this.
I think people are way too stingy and "average" with their ratings! All of the photos you showed are above-average. They're young, slender, clean-cut, good skin, good hair, everything people like. Especially the woman you said was a "7.1," I'd say she's a straight-up 10, and if she went on a date with me I'd be nervously thinking "there's no way a woman this hot is interested in a guy like me."
If you want to see the real bottom of the scale, get off the internet and go to public places. I went to a big park the other day on a warm day. Lots of old people. They had wrinkles, scars, and age spots. The men were almost all bald. The women's fashion sense was... incomprehensible. Many were using canes, walkers, or wheelchairs.
But you know what? They're still people. Many of them were with a partner. I saw a couple dancing. They still have a sense of sexuality. It's actually a real problem that people in nursing homes are spreading STDs to each other. Now *that's* what someone on the low end of the scale looks like!
> I'd say she's a straight-up 10
I'd say you have no idea how Bell curve distributions work.
Agreed. I don't think she's a 10, she looks a bit basic/simple amongst other things, but a good 9.The guy is stunning! Close to a 10 I would say. And he got a 6.5? What is going on
I have some questions about these voted average results. What do people these think the average person looks like? In the US 70% of the population is overweight to name one thing. Half of the population is over 42. From these results I have more believe in peoples self assessment now.
I wonder how these numbers are shifted by the proliferation of images of very hot people we're bombarded with every day. I would love to see how this survey would look if it include images of eg. Influencers and facetuned / photoshopped images, images of models in advertising, like those we see constantly.
First, a thought
- A person's attractiveness is determined by more than their face (I *think* this point is uncontroversial)
- Therefore, when considering how hot someone is in real life, a rater will consider the whole of a person (body, dress, facial expression, posture, vibe, etc), while when rating a photo they can only use a small fraction of that information. Call this Wholistic Mode vs. Face Mode rating.
- This feels true of me, and I'm specualting that it's true many others: *any* person will be rated several points higher in Wholistic Mode than in Face Mode.
- When you're asked to rate yourself, you rate yourself in Wholistic Mode by default.
- You asked in the survey that people guess what other people would rate their *photo*, but I kind of doubt most people are very good at modeling that compared to "how would another person looking at me rate me."
- This sort of thing could plausibly explain some fraction of the discrepancy between self and others' ratings
Second, some notes on my internal experience taking the above survey (as a rater only, not a face submitter). The survey failed to capture how I consider a person's attractiveness, in a way that feels consitent with the highest rated woman's photo being a 7.1. If many other people are similar to me in some of these ways, that might be informative?
- To reiterate above, a person's attractiveness is determined by more than their face
- Face alone is a low enough fraction of total attractiveness that rating a face feels kind of fake. Kind of like being asked to rate how "athletic" someone looks by a picture of their shadow.
- "Hot" and "Attractive" are used kind of interchangeably in this post? A face can be attractive even if that attractiveness could be very different from the person's. Asking if a face is "hot" is a type error.
- Even with just a single picture of a face, the person's *expression* in that picture plays a bigger role in their attractiveness than most actual features of their face. Like if could somehow get me to independently rate two pictures of the same person, one smiling and one not, I predict the smile would rate 2 points higher by default.
- You could *maybe* get a signal for the above thought using your existing data by clustering photos into "smiling" and "not smiling" and seeing if there's a noticeable difference? Especially if there are enough submitters who had different expressions in the "best" and "average"
Don't know if any of the above is useful to you, but I'll stop rambling now. In any case, it's always fun to see what data comes out of your surveys!
This is awesome! Thanks for sharing.
I’ve always felt I’m terrible at selfies. I’m not sure if it’s true that some people’s attractiveness translates to the camera better than others, but if it is true I suspect I may be one of those people who looks better in person. I think I’m reasonably handsome, but when I try to take a picture of myself I look like a dirty pencil eraser trying to smile. It’s also possible I just haven’t gotten the hang of selfies. Depressing if so; I’ve put significant time into it. 😂 Or I guess the third possible explanation is I really do look like that and I have that irrational confidence you mentioned many men seem to have (how dare you suggest that lol). 😝
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is I wonder if the camera thing factors in here? I wonder if there are some people who maybe in person are closer to as attractive as they think they are than the study suggested others perceive them as, but because for whatever reason their hotness didn’t translate to their pictures the data got skewed? Just a random thought.
I’m also inclined to agree with one of your other commenters about men and confidence. We are socialized to present with confidence as it makes us more attractive. For me I’ve taken it a step further and made an effort to internalize a high sense of self-esteem so that it doesn’t feel like an act. It’s true that I feel more attractive than I did as a younger man, though it may well be the case that speaking strictly on a physical level the opposite is the case. Like, it seems unlikely that, all other things being equal, I’m physically hotter at 46 than I was at 26. Yet I definitely think I’m hotter overall, and the results of my dating life suggest others see it that way too.
Camera lenses distort your features - especially phone cameras . I think the most accurate lens is something like a 50mm lens. Not sure though…
The lens and ,more importantly , the distance from the subject being photographed.
One thing this post usefully helped me realize is that when I assign a rating to myself, there's an implicit "among people who go for that kind of thing'. If you simply prefix the question with something like "the raters will be randomly drawn from the opposite sex population" I guess I'd expect my number to drop by due to three points, which seems to be more or less what happens - I actually expect this effect is a bit weaker in your sample due to it being relatively homogeneous!
How is that girl just a 7.1 ? lol
It's an aggregated metric. It also aggregates the responses from men who didn't find her appealing.
I doubt you'll find any woman that appeals to 75%+ men. Even if we're looking at fictional characters designed to have maximally broad appeal to sell skins, the top statistically desirable female character Ahri only had 74% of men picking her as "attractive" in a survey of League of Legends players. (https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1ekt91q/who_is_the_most_attractive_woman_in_league_of/)
I feel like it should go without saying that you can’t draw conclusions about actual people based on how attractive people rate an animated character...
You keep using the word "delusional". What if it's the mere familiarity effect? The more you see your own face in the mirror, the more familiar it becomes, the more you like it. That would be a whitepill because it suggests that friends find you hotter than strangers.
Men's attraction to women is strongly aesthetic. Besides some particular genres or fetishes, most pretty women are pretty in the same way a cathedral is pretty. Objectively, soul enlighteningly pretty. Women's attraction to men is a lot more nebulous. A lot of women are attracted to strength, popularity, or comedic skill, which you'll obviously never see in a photo. Also since these are photos of faces they don't really show height or musculature, which are also important for men on the dating market.
Idk if it’s just because they are mostly too old for the Snapchat era, but the men seemed to really suck at taking pictures of themselves compared to the women. Like bad angles, lighting, etc.
Why not distinguish between faces and bodies? Some of us are decent looking facially but are in extraordinarily good shape. In real life, people see both.
Plus: What about posture? How people move? As far as I'm concerned, those are a significant part of attractiveness.
Bingo, it's what makes Chuukese extremely attractive to most men. They aren't beautiful but they way they walked coupled with their generic proportions ...
You can often know long before you make out the details of a persons face, a lot about them by their gait. It's something poor men leaned long ago with "swagger".
I can't believe how harsh people are. No wonder no one dates anymore.
Curious about the age of the responders. I'm a male in my 60's and I'd find it hard to even guess at my attractiveness now. I'd probably be a 0 to any young woman and anything from 4 to 7 :-) to an "older" woman.
The most interesting to me is people basically rate from 3 to 6. So it's more like a 4-star system.
This seems wild to me. I'd have been curious if they would ever give a 9 ? Maybe slipping some model photos (but not famous) in the mix to check ?
A few years back I used PhotoFeeler to get a sense of my best pictures fro dating, and also to have a more objective number. I was pleasantly surprised as I thought myself as a 6 and got 7 or even close to 8 on my best photo.
As I'm far from being very attractive, it makes me think people in your survey didn't rate the same way that people on PhotoFeeler did. I'm not sure why though. Do you have a hypothesis ?
Assuming attractiveness follows a bell curve, it’s not really surprising that most fall in the middle. My intuition is that 10’s (which are effectively being called 9’s here) are exceptionally rare, like one in a few thousand. So it’s not surprising such a small sample doesn’t have any.
I get what you say about 10s, but if we assume a bell curve with similar standard deviation and mean as IQ, we get these percentages :
10 : 0.0031%
9 : 0.1318%
8 : 2.14%
7 : 13.59%
So in this sample, there should be several people above 6. Especially because we can assume than the subset of responders is more attractive than average (beauty is helped quite a bit by money, and they're basically all educated).
That’s about what I would expect for 9’s and 10’s at least. Are there not several above 6 in this dataset? I didn’t look at the raw data but I think she mentioned a few.
But it's not a bell curves, because people just match up according to where they fall relatively. Every man or every woman could suddenly become far less attractive and it would make no difference in how people pair up because they're all just going by relative spot in line. So using a bell curve makes no sense. Regardless of how "objectively" attractive they are, 10% of men and women are always going to be more attractive than the other 90%, so they, should be 9s and above. Bc let's be honest, who you can get with is the only reason this even matter at all.
That's just notl true. If everyone became objectively less attractive people would pair up less. In fact that's already happening.
People have always paired up no matter how ugly or attractive they are, they just adjust by the pool available. 100 years ago women were far less attractive and ones considered beauty queens then would be 3s today. Yet they all had no problem finding partners. And even today, the highest marriage rates are the places where people are the ugliest (like Arkansas and Alaska), there's no correlation with attractiveness, people just adjust and match on relative rank according to the pool. People aren't getting together today because entertainment, ease, and comfort sitting home and doing nothing is so much higher than in the past, it's just not as unpleasant to be single.
Well said. Until VERY recently, most perspectives on attraction, hierarchy, and practicality (i.e., worthy of long term commitment) were fairly local. Small pond.
In the modern context, particularly with dating apps, the field has grown to global proportions and gamified to absurdity. Big (and increasingly fake or gamed) pond.
I’d rather not make this about gender but I think there’s a meaningful distinction to be made here. Women generally choose to pair up when they can (just look at childlessness rates over time), but a substantial portion of men [have always] lived their lives alone. I’m one of the guys who could probably get laid pretty easily if that was all I was after, but can’t land a relationship with the girls I’m attracted to for more than just sex, so I’ve more or less opted out of the whole thing.
Are alternative forms of entertainment a factor? Sure, I’ll admit to that, but also the level of attraction I feel towards certain women is also definitely definitely definitely a factor. Guys can’t really fake attraction, in the end it either works or it doesn’t.
To say that attractiveness only matters on a relative scale, not absolute, I bet that’s true for less than half the population.
If by “attractive” you mean something like “their sum total valuation as a human, averaged across all judges” I would pretty much agree with you (although I think there’s way more variation in personal preference than you imply).
Strictly physical attractiveness though? Nah, I think it’s pretty much a bell curve.
There is variation sure, but if you took a large enough sample of the full spectrum of actual humans, I don't think it would be that hard to get basic consensus as far as who was in the top 10%, next 10% etc. For one thing, these pics only took the most attractive people to begin with because they're all young and not obese. If you included everyone, they would probably all be in the top 30% just right there. Even if you limited it more, I still think it would not be THAT difficult to get basic consensus on just physical traits, at least in deciles.
For only physical attractiveness, just trying to narrow it down to deciles, yeah absolutely, agree 100%. Where it breaks down for me is thinking that most people are choosing based on rank rather than more individualized personal preference.
At the risk of exposing myself as a deplorable sexist, I think the average man’s calculation would be something like: 50% binary does my dick get hard for her; 25% attractiveness rating on a 1-10 scale; and 25% personality match. Whereas for women I would guess it’s something like 50% binary do my friends approve; 20% income; 20% personality match; 10% attractiveness rating on a 1-10 scale. I just pulled this out of my ass so I’m definitely open to feedback, but to act like it’s the same for men and women seems blatantly absurd.
Can't really speak to that because every female friend I've ever had my whole life from elementary school through my 30s very much cared about male appearance as probably the number one factor, then personality and income basically not at all. So I never know where these ideas come from bc they don't match my own observations. But maybe that's just the places I've lived and people I've known. I almost never see a couple that isn't very "looks matched" as they say, and it stands out to the point that it makes people comment and think it's strange when you see one that's not.
But it does seem that in certain large and very high COL cities like NYC, people are way more focused on income than regular places and I never lived in a huge city, so more hot woman rich man pairings seem to happen in those places. Also, when Aella did her orgy, she had a big questionnaire with qualifications she used to pare down the applications but she did NOT filter based on looks at all. Which I found stunningly bizarre! I asked her about it and she didn't care about the that, which I can't relate to at all, so who knows.
I'd say I'm more like you in that if I couldn't get a guy I thought was actually good looking is just rather be alone. But I think that's more superficial than most people. Go out to the beach or a theme park or sporting event and you will see all kinds of big fat ugly people paired up all around you, the vast majority of people do eventually settle at their level and settle down.