The Big Lies People Tell In Online Dating

People are actually 2 inches shorter in real life

As we all know, the Internet is a great place to pretend to be someone you’re not.

In many online situations, self-misrepresentation is totally harmless. Who cares if your Halo 3 avatar is taller than you are in real life? Or if Flickr thinks you’re single when you’re really married? But in online dating, where the whole goal is to eventually meet other people in person, creating a false impression is a whole different deal.

People do everything they can in their OkCupid profiles to make it the best representation of themselves. But in the world of online dating, it’s very hard for the casual browser to tell truth from what could be fiction. With our behind-the-scenes perspective, we’re able to shed some light on some typical claims and the likely realities behind them.

Let’s get started.

“I’m 6 feet tall.”

REALITY: People are two inches shorter.

The male heights on OkCupid very nearly follow the expected normal distribution — except the whole thing is shifted to the right of where it should be. You can see it better when we overlay the implied best fit below (pardon the technical language):

Almost universally guys like to add a couple inches to their height. You can also see a more subtle vanity at work: starting at roughly 5' 8", the top of the dotted curve tilts even further rightward. This means that guys as they get closer to six feet round up a bit more than usual, stretching for that coveted psychological benchmark.

When we looked into the data for women, the height exaggeration was just as widespread, though without the lurch towards a benchmark height:

But as far as messages go, shorter women actually seem to get more attention: