Interracial Relationships More Common Among Online Daters

Online daters tend to prefer people of the same race but a recent study suggests that those who actually respond to contacts from other races are more likely to end up in an actual relationship.

The new research suggests that online daters are often more willing than they thought they would ever be when it comes to responding to people of a different race. The researchers involved in the study analyzed actual behaviors by anonymous data provided by dating websites and the results were published in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

"I'm showing that racial boundaries are being crossed and are more permeable than we once thought," says sociologist Kevin Lewis of the University of California, San Diego. Lewis found that people are more likely to respond to interest from someone of another race than initiate the actual contact, according to USA Today.

"It's not that people's levels of prejudice are changing; people are avoiding others from a different racial background because they think those other people won't be interested," he says. "Receiving an interracial contact and replying to it makes you send over twice as many new interracial messages in the short-term future than you would have otherwise."

Lewis also confirmed that the tendency to initiate contact within one's own race was greatest among Asians and Indians, according to NAT Monitor. "Based on a lifetime of experiences in a racist and racially segregated society, people anticipate discrimination on the part of a potential recipient and are largely unwilling to reach out in the first place." "But if a person of another race expresses interest in them first, their assumptions are falsified-and they are more willing to take a chance on people of that race in the future," he surmised.