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> most people think in absolutes: Either something is the bee's knees or it's fried shit on a biscuit. (Yes, this is from two levels up.)

There was a fascinating post to the OKCupid blog discussing the distribution of attractiveness ratings (also on a 1-5 scale).

Ratings of women by men looked like this:

    5: ||||
    4: ||||||||
    3: ||||||||||
    2: ||||||||
    1: ||||
Ratings of men by women looked like this:

    5: ||
    4: ||
    3: |||
    2: |||||||
    1: ||||||||||||||||||||
EDIT: As you might expect when working from memory, I got some details wrong. Post is here: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dati...

Obvious corrections:

Scale is 0-5, not 1-5

Curve for women is not as steep as depicted in my comment. However, the modal rating is 1, followed by 0. In the words of the post, "women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh."



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