What is this all about?

A while ago a good friend and me were discussing a statement made by her mother. She stated that people who prefer savoury snacks like sex, while those who prefer sweet snacks like cuddling. Her mother spent some time thinking about it and came to the conclusion that it must be true.

When we heard this statement we started discussing it, and we couldn't really refute it off the cuff. So we made a survey, used r/SampleSize to get some respondents and did the science to determine if snack preference predicts whether someone likes cuddling or sex more.

Below we share the survey, the raw results, and show some interesting charts that we generated using the data. Oh, and of course we do the science to determine whether snack preference predicts sex vs. cuddling.

So what is this all about? It's about SNAAAAAACKS:

The survey

For the survey we asked questions in three different categories. We first asked for some demographic information, then we moved on the 18+ questions, and finally we concluded by asking whether people prefer sweet snacks or savoury snacks. The questions are listed below:

Demographic questions: Gender? (male, female, other)

We worded this as sex, but it should've been gender. Age? Education level?

We provided 5 levels, no education, high school, bachelor, masters and PhD. This matches the Dutch system, but from what we gathered from the comments this doesn't match the US system. However, it appeared that people picked the closest matching options. Are your partnered? (yes/no/it's complicated)

18+ Questions: Do you prefer sex or cuddling? (sex, cuddling) How many sexual partners have you had in the past year? Would you consider yourself sexually adventurous? (yes, no, maybe)

Snacks: Do you prefer sweet or savoury snacks? (sweet, savoury)



In total we had around 2,150 responses to the survey, which is an absolutely insane amount! So thanks r/SampleSize! Below is all the raw data, represented as histograms, pie charts or boxplots.

Figure 1: Set of pie charts showing the raw values received for all categorical questions.

Some interesting things in Figure 1: Gender division of male vs. female was about 50/50. So as it turns out not all Reddit readers are male, in fact, half of them are female. Secondly about 2.4% of respondents chose a gender option that is neither male nor female. In this group there were quite some attack helicopters (very original 🙄), but there were also some people who preferred not to say, or who filled out various other options. Then there is the 33/33/33 split when it comes to the question do you consider yourself to be sexually adventurous or not? Which would almost make you believe that people randomly picked one of the three options.

Figure 2: Histogram showing the division of respondent ages.

Nothing too shocking when it comes to ages, although we have to say that the mean age is a bit higher than expected. However, this could just be a sampling bias, as r/SampleSize probably has a higher average age than say r/Teenagers.

Figure 3: Histogram showing the number of sexual partners in the past year.

First of all, we applied some filtering when it comes to the data. For instance, there were some people who filled out they had 600+ sexual partners in the last year. While some people do get around, 2 unique sexual partners per day for a whole year is quite an unlikely value. The long tailed distribution seems to indicate that most respondents have fewer sexual partners, with a few outliers.

Sex and Snacks

So this is the question we're all interested in. Does snack preference predict whether someone prefers sex over cuddling? Let's start by visualizing it:

Figure 4: Grouped bar chart showing cuddling vs sex over snack preference.

Based on Figure 4 you could say it is looking pretty bad for supporters of this hypothesis. However, there is more that we can do to analyze this: For instance, we can do a paired t-test to see if snack and sex preferences are from the same population. If this is the case the hypothesis is supported. As we expect that savoury lines up with sex, and sweet with cuddling. However, the p-value of a Wilcoxon signed rank test is very, very small. Indicating that these distributions come from different populations, and thereby refuting the hypothesis.

Moreover, we also built a linear model where we try to predict sex preferences based on all features collected in the survey. In this model we see that there is no significance to the snacks feature, therefore indicating that snack preference does not predict the sexual preference of someone.

If we combine these three facts it doesn't take us long to arrive at the conclusion that there is no link whatsoever between snack preferences and sex preferences.

Sex & Co.

Figure 5: Boxplots which show the ages of the four different groups.

However, with the data that we have there is more we can analyze, for instance, how are the ages for the sex preference grouped by snacks distributed? As can be observed in Figure 5 there is not a large difference in these age distributions.

Figure 6: Grouped bar chart showing sexually adventurous vs. sex preference.

Now that we know that snack preference does not predict sex preference we can check if there might be other features in the data that do predict sex preference. For instance Figure 6 shows sex vs. cuddling distributed over the possible answers for 'Do you consider yourself to be sexually adventurous?'. Apparently the more sexually adventurous someone considers themselves, the higher the chance they prefer sex.

Figure 7: Grouped bar chart showing relationship status against sex preference.

We can also do the same for relationship status, where Figure 7 shows us that single people apparently prefer (or maybe miss?) cuddling. And of course a shout-out to all those poor souls who submitted 'It's complicated' for their relationship status.

Gender and Education

Figure 8: Different genders prefer different activities.

We don't just have to look at snacks, for instance, using the gender information we have we can also plot sex preference against gender. Figure 8 shows us that women tend to prefer cuddling more, while for men the split is almost 50/50.

Figure 9: Relationship status and gender.

When it comes to gender and relations we can observe from Figure 9 that females on Reddit more often tend to have a partner than males on Reddit.

Figure 10: Distribution of age over relationship status and gender.

Figure 10 shows us that there are pretty insignificant age difference between different groups if we look at relationship status and gender. However, males in relationship might be a tiny bit younger on average.

Figure 11: Education levels and sex preference.

Finally, (and this is the last set of plots, I promise!), Figure 11 shows how sex preference is distributed over education levels. Nothing too special here, there appears to be no difference in whether someone prefers sex or cuddling for different education levels.

Figure 12: Education levels and relationship status.

In Figure 12 we see that ratio between single and partnered slowly shifts as the education level increases. Whether this just is because age also increases, or whether education level actually factors in something that will have to be followed up on.

Figure 13: What do people of different education levels say about whether they are sexually adventurous or not?

For the last plot of the series we look at Figure 13 and see that apparently post-bachelor students go through a phase where they consider themselves to be more sexually adventurous than other groups. However, this is relatively short-lived as they settle down again after their masters or PhD.

In closing

So, the most important take-away point here is that there is no relation between snacks and sexual preference (A real shocker, I know!). Additionally, it is interesting to see how the population of reddit is divided, and especially how sexual preferences is distributed over relationship status and gender. Also, we might have a problem taking things too seriously, as this has been a huge waste of time. But oh well.

Finally a big thank you to r/SampleSize for providing us with so many great datapoints! To analyze the data we've used Jupyter Notebooks, and this site is being hosted with Github pages, using a Bootstrap template that can be found in the footer. If you're interested in the code check out the GitHub project here.