Your picture is everything in the shallow world of online dating

OK Cupid have helped thousands of people around the world find love. Along the way, they've also learnt just how shallow humans truly are.

In their site's latest trends blog, the site's co-founder Christian Rudder details some tests that the site has been carrying out - and it turns out some online daters are only looking at the pictures. When they got rid of images, it made a huge difference. Getting rid of profile text, not so much.

So, your picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth…almost nothing.

Just to emphasise that, this is what happened to their site metrics on the day they removed all the pictures from OKCupid.

That's not the only thing the site learnt. They also told users who were were only a 30 per cent match for each other that they were well-suited, and found that people tended to believe it. In a nutshell: "the mere myth of compatibility works just as well as the truth."