by Why attractive people you date tend to be jerks Have you ever noticed that, among the people you date, the attractive ones tend to be jerks? Instead of constructing elaborate psychosocial theories, consider a simpler explanation. Your choice of people to date depends on two factors, attractiveness and personality. You’ll take a chance on dating a mean attractive person or a nice unattractive person, and certainly a nice attractive person, but not a mean unattractive person … This creates a spurious negative correlation between attractiveness and personality. The sad truth is that unattractive people are just as mean as attractive people — but you’ll never realize it, because you’ll never date somebody who is both mean and unattractive. The spurious
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Lars Pålsson Syll considers the following as important: Statistics & Econometrics
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Why attractive people you date tend to be jerks
Have you ever noticed that, among the people you date, the attractive ones tend to be jerks? Instead of constructing elaborate psychosocial theories, consider a simpler explanation. Your choice of people to date depends on two factors, attractiveness and personality. You’ll take a chance on dating a mean attractive person or a nice unattractive person, and certainly a nice attractive person, but not a mean unattractive person … This creates a spurious negative correlation between attractiveness and personality. The sad truth is that unattractive people are just as mean as attractive people — but you’ll never realize it, because you’ll never date somebody who is both mean and unattractive.
The spurious correlation — ‘collider bias’ — is here induced because the outcome of the two variables is ‘controlled for’. Mean people are not necessarily attractive, and nor are nice people. Looking only at people that do date, you would however probably guess that the mean ones are attractive. In order to date lack of nicety has to be compensated with attractiveness.
If anything this should be a helpful reminder for economists who nowadays seem to be more than happy to add lots of variables to their regressions ‘controlling for’ omitted variables bias. In this case, dating someone is a collider of multiple causes — attractiveness and personality — that gives the false impression that there is a trade-off between the two variables.