this is my favorite subject. my reply will not be as "quick" as yours
I was reluctant to read any of the links you provided in the first place due to skepticism on my part, which came from having spent quite a bit of time on dating sites myself and seen a lot of experiments and done a few too. Plus the fact that you're not a man so could have no direct experience with this either :P
But I decided to look over links anyway. Upon spotting something which I know to be TOTALLY false I decided to just stop reading. That paper was already too long to begin with and that paragraph just lost it all credibility, in the same manor I would stop reading a Geography book written in 2016 If the Author wrote somewhere "Do not drive too far east of Africa because the earth is flat". I wouldn't care who it was written by or what level of qualification or endorsement it had, I would just stop reading.
And yes, I've done my own experiments. You seem to not want to take people doing their own experiments seriously for some reason. I was getting less than 1 girl out of 100 replying to me in London on pof when sending them unsolicted mail and I had listened to all the advice women give about profile text, opening messages, reading their profile text and mentioning specific things when messaging and it wasn't making a blind bit of difference. So I simply deleted my pic and put one up of a shirtless white guy who was around 7.5 in looks [imo] and started sending off messages again. Only took 3 messages for him to get a reply from a hot girl. He was getting a large amount of views too ..also a large amount of unsolicited mail. This experiment may not have been "scientific" or done under lab controls or "peer reviewed" ...or got an official stamp of approval from some governing body or whatever ...but it was CLEAR that personality meant diddly squat online and that all that women are looking for was looks.
I ran some other experiments after that as well [slightly differant], I could not understand why a good looking guy like myself was doing so badly ofline and online. Soon I was forced to acknowledged that I was wasn't as good looking as I thought and that I was over rating myself. Don't blame me for this lol, it's actually pretty common. I have looked into this [including seeing studies] and discovered that most people actually think they are better looking than they infact are. The
average girl does not see herself as average, she see's herself as a 7 because "If people took the time to get to know me they'd see what a wonderful personal I am" ..., below average girls often think they are above average too citing their " Amazing personality" as justification for their ratings. Men over rate themselves also but usually don't cite reasons such as this, maybe it's just pure arrogance on their part.
Although my experiments and conclusions reached were not 100% scientific I believe they were valid as when i started working on my looks [gym] eventually i started to do both better online and ofline. It's still a struggle to get a date online buy ofline it's significantly easier. I put that down to the fact im not really very photogenic. I sometimes even get wolf wistelend by girls on fri/sat night. If i never did my "experiments" I would have not improved my dating life as I would be still listening to the false advice many women like to spread.
to any guy reading this, bodyshape is another lie many women like to spread. Most women will say they find "slim and toned" most attractive. They don't. Most women will also say they find brawny guys unattractive [too much muscles] and actually prefer skinny or average guys to this. I decided to do one of my experiments and put up a shirtless skinny guy and a shirtless brawny guy on pof. 3 guesses what happened.
tbh, having said all that there is a grain of truth in that women don't prefer brawny guys. I would not recommend a guy aims for this figure if his goal is maximize the opposite sex's attraction to him...
regarding my challenge. I challenge you to get a 1 in 5 reply rate from average women with a below average man then
the paper said a below average man should get a 1 in 5 reply rate with top percentile women, so this challenge should be really easy for you if you believe the paper.
the study said that a bottom percentile man can expect to hear back from a top percentile woman over 20% of the time. by "hear back" I assume this is a "first responce" or reply to the message.
PS: you mentioned you haven't read the paper. You should not link to papers or research you haven't read first, because what can happen is individuals such as myself may decide to call you out over things written in said paper