{"id":10484,"date":"2022-04-28T05:08:31","date_gmt":"2022-04-28T04:08:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/?p=10484"},"modified":"2022-04-28T05:08:31","modified_gmt":"2022-04-28T04:08:31","slug":"what-do-0-10-scales-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/2022\/04\/what-do-0-10-scales-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"What do 0\/10 scales mean?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We often use the 0-10 scale to rate people for various things, but especially attractiveness.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-10485\" src=\"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2-out-of-10-804x1024.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"804\" height=\"1024\" srcset=\"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2-out-of-10-804x1024.png 804w, https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2-out-of-10-236x300.png 236w, https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2-out-of-10-768x978.png 768w, https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2-out-of-10.png 1005w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 804px) 100vw, 804px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>But what do people really mean when they say someone is an 8 out of 10? How does that correspond to the distribution of attractiveness? We can <em>probably<\/em> assume that attractiveness is roughly normally distributed. (I am aware the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gwern.net\/docs\/psychology\/okcupid\/yourlooksandyourinbox.html\">OKCupid results show something different for women&#8217;s ratings<\/a>, but I think these does not reflect reality.) Here&#8217;s some results from a random paper I just found:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10486\" src=\"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/malawa-attractiveness.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"912\" height=\"475\" srcset=\"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/malawa-attractiveness.png 912w, https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/malawa-attractiveness-300x156.png 300w, https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/malawa-attractiveness-768x400.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 912px) 100vw, 912px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It is pretty difficult to find papers that just give you some distribution plots. Believe it or not, the first study I found of real people <a href=\"https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/318989520_Physical_attractiveness_and_women%27s_HIV_risk_in_rural_Malawi\">is based on an HIV study of rural Malawians<\/a>. Anyway, we see that the distributions are pretty normal when split by education, and the overall distribution would be even more normal. The marriage-status distributions is affected by age, so somewhat odd looking.<\/p>\n<p>So to the main question. What if you asked people: &#8220;If someone is described as a 8\/10 for attractiveness. Which percentage of the population does that mean they are prettier than?&#8221; So, the goal here is to make a conversion to centiles. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/KirkegaardEmil\/status\/1518647225114632199\">I tweeted a questionnaire with 11 questions like that<\/a>, and 41 people filled it out (alas, I am not Aella, my surveys don&#8217;t get 1000 horny men to provide free labor). But 41 is good enough. It looks like this:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-10487\" src=\"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/0_10_scale-1024x666.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"666\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Quantitatively:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10489\" src=\"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/ratings-0-10-numbers.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"277\" srcset=\"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/ratings-0-10-numbers.png 600w, https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/ratings-0-10-numbers-300x139.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>So we see that the medians are almost spot on for a simple linear interpretation (i.e., multiply by 10). The only exception is that 10\/10 is 99th centile, not 100th. But there is some disagreement. At least one person thinks that 8\/10 is actually top 2% (98th centile).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We often use the 0-10 scale to rate people for various things, but especially attractiveness. But what do people really mean when they say someone is an 8 out of 10? How does that correspond to the distribution of attractiveness? We can probably assume that attractiveness is roughly normally distributed. (I am aware the OKCupid [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1653],"tags":[2663,3132,3133],"class_list":["post-10484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology","tag-attractiveness","tag-rating","tag-scales","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10484"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10493,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10484\/revisions\/10493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}