While racial barriers are a fact of life for online daters, a new study from the University of California, San Diego suggests that they are not as insurmountable as we may think, and can be overcome.
UC San Diego sociologist Kevin Lewis studied 126,134 users of online dating site Okcupid over the course of two-and-a-half months, and while he found that people often self-segregate online, a practice he refers to as "pre-emptive discrimination," people were also many times willing to cross racial lines and reciprocate with a potential partner they may not otherwise consider.
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Lewis's "The Limits of Racial Prejudice" studied only heterosexual interactions between people who self-identify as Black, White, Asian (East Asian), Hispanic/Latino or Indian (South Asian), the top five most common Okcupid racial categories, and analyzed only the first message sent and the first reply, all content stripped except for the sender's data, receiver's data and timestamp on each of the mssages.
Lewis found that the tendency to self-segregate while searching for a mate was strongest among Asian and Indian users and weakest among whites, though the biggest "reversals" occurred among groups with the "greatest tendency towards in-group bias" and when users were contacted by someone of a different racial group for the first time.
"Based on a lifetime of experiences in a racist and racially segregated society, people anticipate discrimination on the part of a potential recipient and are largely unwilling to reach out in the first place. But if a person of another race expresses interest in them first, their assumptions are falsified-and they are more willing to take a chance on people of that race in the future," Lewis said in a press release.
However, Lewis added that the effect of reversals are short-lived, and in about a week, people go back to their original patterns of choosing potential partners.
"The new-found optimism is quickly overwhelmed by the status quo, by the normal state of affairs. Racial bias in assortative mating is a robust and ubiquitous social phenomenon, and one that is difficult to surmount even with small steps in the right direction. We still have a long way to go."
According to the Daily Mail, an estimated 20 percent of heterosexual and 70 percent of same-sex relationships now begin online, giving social scientists a "rich source of data" for future research. Lewis feels that "online dating is providing new insights into the timeless social process of finding a romantic partner," as it often can be studied systematically.
Earlier research on the subject of "pre-emptive discrimination" during online dating has not, according to Lewis, been able to detangle the factors of prejudice and georgraphy, though he feels his analysis has touched on such factors. Further research is also needed to help explain why certain racial groups tend towards an in-group bias as they date online.
