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bramflakes comments on Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks - Less Wrong
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Your theory doesn't seem to stand up to the data, here and here. It seems it's women that underestimate male attractiveness. Men's judgments are almost symmetrical. Data is from Okcupid surveys.
(obvious confounds: people that use okcupid may not be representative of the population generally, both for the raters and ratees.)
In order to make the data from OKCupid correspond to an underestimation, you have to equate the arbitrary 1-5 rating with some absolute measure like "quintile of attractiveness." This does not necessarily hold.
There is some grounding in the OKCupid data, but it comes from the functional meaning of the point scores: when two people mutually rate each other four or five stars, they're both notified. A score of four or five is therefore a weak way of saying "I find this person attractive enough that I'd like to meet them". (We aren't necessarily talking strictly physical attraction, though; "everyone knows" that the scores are based on photos more than profile text, but I have no idea how true this actually is.) Scores in the 0..3 range have no direct effects, but they may be anchored in some way by the fraction of people rated 4 or 5.
This is all to the best of my knowledge; I haven't been active on OKCupid for a couple of years and they might have tweaked the interface since then. On the other hand, I do remember seeing those analytics pages when I was active.
Good point. That thought never influenced me when I was on OKCupid, but maybe that's just a guy thing :P
I'm not sure "underestimate" is the right description here; my opinion (as an androphile) is that the male attractiveness distribution is heavily skewed, basically in the way that women think it is, if the 1-5 scale measures the underlying strength of attraction rather than quintiles. (3s, 4s, and 5s all fall in the top quintile of male attractiveness, but it seems that there are much larger gradations there than there are in the top quintile of female attractiveness.)
And for the underlying question of access to sex, the message distribution is more important, but isn't scaled correctly for comparisons between the two.
I'm not an androphile myself, but that's my impression too, for various reasons (see e.g. the paragraph starting with “Similarly” in this post).
BTW, here's the post the graphs were taken from.
It doesn't show that woman underestimate male attractiveness. It shows that in online dating woman are in generally able to focus on the more attractive candidates.
What would that even mean? Remember that attractiveness is a two-place word. Women are underestimating how attractive men are to whom? Would a more natural description of the OKC data that men are in average less attractive to women than vice versa?
(I think you misunderstood what MugaSofer meant, which he better explained in his reply. IIUC what he hypothesized is that if you picked an actually median women and you asked people what fraction of the female population are less attractive than her, you'd get an answer much less than 50% -- e.g. because below-median women are underrepresented in mass media compared to above-median ones, or something.)
Well, for starters, it's mainly used by single people, so very desirable people are filtered out unless they are also very picky.
Both correct, my bad.
Huh. Those are some very interesting numbers, I'll have to look over those.
I was talking about people (possibly) overestimating how attractive the median woman is*, though, not people failing to identify how attractive specific women are - which I think is what those graphs relate to? How well estimated attractiveness actually predicts people being attracted?
*(leading to suggesting strategies for most women that actually only work for a high-attractiveness minority, perhaps.)
okCupid lets users rate other users on a 0-5 scale from pictures; for each user, you can average together all of the ratings to determine their mean attractiveness. (They're also stored such that you can only look at women's rating of men, and men's rating of women, rather than also looking at men's rating of men.)
When you ask men to rate women on a 0-5 scale, they do it basically uniformly- about 5% of women have an average rating close to 5, and about 5% of women have an average rating close to 0, and 20% of women have an average rating of about 2.5. When you ask women to rate men on a 0-5 scale, they skew heavily towards giving men 1s. Now, for your question what actually matters is the "would bang" line, which has to come from some other source. I would be amazed if there were not sufficient men on the margin willing to bang a 2.5. According to women, the median man is about a 1- it does not seem surprising that there are insufficient women on the margin willing to bang a 1.