The OKCupid dataset: A very large public dataset of dating site users
Open Differential Psychology , Nov. 3, 2016, ISSN: 2446-3884
A very large dataset (N=68,371, 2,620 variables) from the dating site OKCupid is presented and made publicly available for use by others. As an example of the analyses one can do with the dataset, a cognitive ability test is constructed from 14 suitable items. To validate the dataset and the test, the relationship of cognitive ability to religious beliefs and political interest/participation is examined. Cognitive ability is found to be negatively related to all measures of religious belief (latent correlations -.26 to -.35), and found to be positively related to all measures of political interest and participation (latent correlations .19 to .32). To further validate the dataset, we examined the relationship between Zodiac sign and every other variable. We found very scant evidence of any influence (the distribution of p-values from chi square tests was flat). Limitations of the dataset are discussed.
