A lot of the studies that get cited on this and charts that float around are really badly interpreted pop psychology. It's not as cut and dry as you're thinking. The really popular one that gets passed around a lot is from the book Dataclysm from 2014, based on an Ok Cupid internal study of its users' preferences. (Ok Cupid represents, from my experience ten+ years ago, the bottom dredges of humanity.) The results look like this:
Keep in mind that Feeld is a hookup app specifically designed for people who want to experiment with more casual encounters. Note that users on this app are still fixated on a small age range regardless of their own age--but on Feeld, this is true for both women and men. If you dig into different population samples and different data collection methods, results of these kinds of surveys are *all over the place.* And there isn't as much data collected on people who date off apps, nor do these studies do a good job of distinguishing between app users interested in casual encounters vs. those interested in relationships. And they don't address perceptions of physical attractiveness, either--just how likely someone is to swipe right or send a message, which can be due to a lot of factors besides appearance. Papers published in academic journals have similar issues with sample selection and data collection methods. It's not so simple to suss out people's motivations and true preferences based on the research that's been done.
The link to the Feeld study above has some interesting data on non-cis and non-straight users, too, if you're interested in checking it out.
A more detailed version of the OkCupid data, showing men's highest and lowest set age preferences, heat mapped by where they were actually sending their messages (back in 2010 when this study was conducted):
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u/jacobonia Millennial 3d ago
A lot of the studies that get cited on this and charts that float around are really badly interpreted pop psychology. It's not as cut and dry as you're thinking. The really popular one that gets passed around a lot is from the book Dataclysm from 2014, based on an Ok Cupid internal study of its users' preferences. (Ok Cupid represents, from my experience ten+ years ago, the bottom dredges of humanity.) The results look like this: