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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   9667 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Hey guys, I'm running a survey on romantic preferences, and you've always been great in the past so I thought I'd ask if anyone is interested in participating in the new round.

Survey for people Attracted To Women

Survey for people Attracted to Men

I don't post here much - I had to reregister since it's been months since I last came around and I don't remember my old handle - but you can get a better sense of me find the results of the last survey we did at these pages: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/honesty-agreeableness-and-sexuality https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/what-they-didnt-tell-you-about-political https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-conservatives

I'm curious why you ask "I'd like a partner who is..." and two of the options are "educated" and "uneducated". Surely the response to one of these on a Likert scale is just the inverse of the response to the other?

Not necessarily. Just as one might be turned on by both women and men, so might one find both "educated" and "uneducated" to be appealing qualities.

To me, that sounds more like a person's educational attainment is irrelevant to how attractive you find them.

Absent more context, I'd consider uneducated to mean dropped out prior to graduating high school and educated to mean has a college degree. I could definitely see there being room for someone to not want someone uneducated but being indifferent about educated.

I'd consider uneducated to be highschool, normal to be bachelors, educated to mean an advanced degree

Some reasons I can think of

  • check how consistent respondents are
  • capture people who are attracted to both extremes
  • capture people who are neutral towards one but attracted towards the other

You'd think! However, checking the results prematurely, they clearly are not. Psychology is messy, and the way people answer questions is often tapping into more than merely linear effects. Just consider the kind of person who says "Educated? No! I don't want one of those educated women! But I don't want a dummy either!" Or equally, "Ooh, scientists are hot! Also yeah I love trailer park bimbos... and women with chopsticks in their hair... Hey why is there no chopsticks option?"

Anyway thank you for taking the survey, the Motte is totally rad.

I'm looking forward to seeing the results and the analysis!

For what it's worth, on page one I was a little irritated with your two-word pairings several times. I'm often one, but not the other - so if asked on their own, I would have given different answers. Examples are:

  • "Active, Talkative"
  • "Down-to-Earth, Unimaginative"
  • "Amoral, Carefree"

Agreed. I decided not to fill it out on this basis.

People sometimes do.

You're not the only one; I wouldn't ask these questions if they didn't work so very, very well. Therefore you must choose: Are you down to earth? Or imaginative? Moral? Or carefree? Active? Or silent? Make your choice! (Or else click the "neutral / ambivalent" option. Like, ambivalence is a thing.)

And thank you also for taking the survey. Every drop of water raises the ocean, especially when the ocean is just, like, 400 drops.

Seconded, many of these adjective pairs aren't really synonymous. Many people are active (in the sense of being physically fit) but not talkative, and vice versa. "Carefree" to me suggests "lacking in neuroticism/anxiety", not lacking in moral principles.

Why should they be synonymous? The more synonymous the word pairs are, the less you need two words. The point of having an additional word is to alter the way people answer.

Normally when a personality questionnaire asks you to rate how accurately an adjective describes you, they either use a single adjective (neurotic) or a series of closely related adjectives (anxious, worrisome, moody). This is the first time I recall seeing a questionnaire asking me how much a group of (to my eyes) completely independent adjectives describes me.

Yeah, and even if you go by context, it doesn't work. I'm active in conversation - but not talkative. I prefer to ask questions, and have other people do the talking. This often means I steer the conversation and keep it going, but hearing what I say isn't that interesting to me.

yeah, same.

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