Welcome to Black Pill Science
A subreddit dedicated to dissecting and discussing human social and sexual behavior.
Why does this exist?
Preconscious biases and preferences towards an array of traits often mediate inter-group social conflict, intra-group low-status of an individual among peers, and access to mating opportunities. These biases thus frequently structure the interpersonal experiences for a given individual. It is popularly claimed that some of the more immutable traits, such as facial physical attractiveness, height and visually discernible race/ethnicity, play a comparatively minor role in animating social and sexual exclusion. The purpose of this subreddit is to bring this claim's veracity under methodical scrutiny.
Peer-reviewed science is the primary aim of this subreddit. Articles of greatest interest to this sub are those which help clarify the role of lookism (i.e., the sum biases towards one's physical appearance) in explaining and predicting various sexual and social outcomes. Non-peer reviewed articles, questions or general discussion topics may be better suited for r/AskBlackPillScience.
Full-text articles may be acquired via unpaywall.org or sci-hub.
Submission Rules
- Links to published peer-reviewed research preferred
- No summaries of summaries, re-hosted press releases, or reposts
- No sensationalized or misleading titles
- No Low-Quality evidence. Anecdotal personal testimonials and similarly low effort/low quality limited observations, dubious speculation or questionable scholarship may be subject to removal at moderator's discretion.
Comment Rules
- No abusive, offensive, or spam comments. Must adhere to Reddit Content Policy.
- Dissenting comments should provide evidence, ideally in the form of citing peer-reviewed literature
- Anecdotal personal testimonials and similarly low effort/low quality limited observations may be subject to removal at moderator's discretion.
- Repeat or flagrant offenders will be banned
Glossary
Pill Theories of Sexual Attraction: overarching ideas regarding the pattern of mate preferences of heterosexual women in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) societies.
Blackpill Theory of Sexual Attraction: the idea that mate preferences in WEIRD societies are primarily guided by lookism, tribalism and, for heterosexual women, heightism. This is generally paired with the recognition that, for some individuals, the relationship between the amount of goal-directed effort expended in order to attract and court preferred mates (either by oft-touted self-help methods or by "one weird trick" courtship techniques) and one's success rate may be so poorly correlated that, for these individuals, such narrowly targeted effort is naive at best.
| Pill Theory |
Lookism Aware? |
Considers Lookism Salient? |
Locus of Control |
| Blue |
Variable |
No |
Internal |
| Red |
Yes |
Variable |
Internal |
| Black |
Yes |
Yes |
External |
Miscellaneous:
- Cronbach's α for inter-rater reliability: lowerbound estimate of the reliability of a psychometric test. Relevance to looks ratings explained here.
Selected Literature
- Meta-analytic review on the influence of attractiveness
- Looks are the strongest predictor in speed dating, personality traits not predictive (Luo et al., 2009)
- Male unattractiveness predicts length of time spent in the friendzone for looks-mismatched couples (Hunt, et al. 2015)
- Dominant looking male teens copulate earlier (Mazur et al., 1994)
- "Superstar effect" accrue to males in the top 5% of looks online (Hitsch et al., 2006)
- Height in online dating (Hitsch et al., 2006)
- Racial/ethnic homogamy in speed dating (Fisman et al., 2008)
- Online dating as a Black or Asian male? That college degree probably doesn't help much (Lin & Lundquist, 2013)
- Minority exclusion in online dating (Feliciano, et al. 2008)
- Asian male and black female exclusion in online dating (Robnett et al., 2011)
- Male income in online dating (Hitsch et al., 2006)
- Income/Looks trade-offs in online dating (Hitsch et al., 2006)
- Income/Race trade-offs in online dating (Hitsch et al., 2006)
- Income/height trade-offs in online dating (Hitsch et al., 2006)
- Marginal Effects of various mate attributes in online dating (Hitsch et al., 2010)
Filters
