Who prefers to date people of their own race?
Data from the OKCupid project.
In light of a recent paper examining who prefers to date within their own religion, I recalled that there was a question about this in the OKCupid dataset, except that it is for race: "Would you strongly prefer to go out with someone of your own skin color / racial background?" It's a dichotomous outcome, where yes = 1, so I used a logistic model. I added the usual predictors. Results:
$coefs
Beta SE CI.lower CI.upper
age 0.03 0.01 0.00 0.06
gender: Man 0.00 NA NA NA
gender: Other -1.85 0.59 -3.01 -0.70
gender: Woman 0.12 0.03 0.06 0.19
race: White 0.00 NA NA NA
race: Mixed -1.15 0.06 -1.27 -1.03
race: Asian -0.66 0.07 -0.80 -0.52
race: Hispanic / Latin -1.40 0.09 -1.57 -1.22
race: Black -1.49 0.09 -1.67 -1.31
race: Other -2.06 0.15 -2.36 -1.76
race: Indian -0.60 0.15 -0.89 -0.31
race: Middle Eastern -1.30 0.24 -1.78 -0.82
race: Native American -0.28 0.26 -0.78 0.22
race: Pacific Islander -2.93 0.72 -4.35 -1.52
CA -0.41 0.02 -0.44 -0.38
ideology: Liberal / Left-wing 0.00 NA NA NA
ideology: Centrist 0.74 0.04 0.66 0.82
ideology: Conservative / Right-wing 1.49 0.05 1.39 1.60
ideology: Other 0.76 0.04 0.69 0.83
religion_seriousness: Not at all important 0.00 NA NA NA
religion_seriousness: Not very important 0.42 0.04 0.35 0.49
religion_seriousness: Somewhat important -0.18 0.03 -0.25 -0.12
religion_seriousness: Extremely important -0.09 0.03 -0.15 -0.04
$meta
N pseudo-R2 deviance AIC
34519.00 0.12 30143.27 30183.27$meta N pseudo-R2 deviance AIC 34519.00 0.12 30143.27 30183.27The betas are standardized. CA = cognitive ability. Measured from an ad hoc collection of 14 items.
Some conclusions:
Women are slightly more ethnocentric.
All non-White races are less ethnocentric.
Smarter people are less ethnocentric.
Non-liberals and particularly conservatives/right-wingers are more ethnocentric.
Religion has a non-linear relationship in that the somewhat religious are more ethnocentric, but the more strongly religious are less ethnocentric.
See also: heritability of ethnocentrism and related traits (sorry egalitarians, racists were born that way!)
R code: https://gist.github.com/Deleetdk/a64dcfa8ae93e5b918b2f64024f6bdf4
Previously I found that religiousness predicted ethnocentrism fairly linearly, but I can't reproduce the result -- even using the same code! No idea what caused this result.