In the previous piece I went through 24 million ratings from our app Rate Me (people rate each other's photos 1-10) and showed four things: the dip at nine, men underrating men, countries rating differently, raters getting tired within a session. The most common follow-up question was about age. So here is age - plus one myth I believed myself.
Same disclaimer as last time: this is data about how raters behave, not about who is "more attractive". Birth dates are self-reported, so every cut below uses only pairs where both ages are known and fall in 16-80. A rating of 5 is the slider's default position; it makes up a quarter of all ratings and pulls every group's average down equally, so it does not affect comparisons between groups.
1. Age of the person rated: peak at 18-24, then only downhill
In all four "who rates whom" pairs the maximum sits at 18-24 and the average then declines monotonically:
Men rating women: 6.75 (18-24) → 6.49 (25-34) → 6.17 (35-44) → 6.04 (45-54) → 5.52 (55+). The first cell alone is 6.5M ratings, the biggest slice of the dataset.
