So You Want To Be A Scientist? Facebook Profile Pics Experiment: Results

Title: "Taken at Face Value? A Study of Online Profiles from Facebook.com "

By Nina Jones and Dr. Bernie Hogan

Introduction

Facebook Scope:

In recent years, social networking sites have grown exponentially to become a true part of modern life. As of 2009 fifty percent of Internet users in Britain use Facebook or another social network site regularly (Dutton, et al., 2009 .pdf). For many (a figure now which has now surpassed 500 million) it is now a daily feature in their lives. Facebook brands itself as a 'social utility', yet it has been criticized as cheapening the concept of a friend and as a poor substitute for offline interaction. Much of this criticism hinges on the notion that Facebook is narcissistic, or self involved.

What is Facebook?

Facebook is a social networking site. In recent years, social networking sites have grown exponentially to become a true part of modern life. Facebook brands itself as a 'social utility', yet it has been criticized as cheapening the concept of a friend and as a poor substitute for offline interaction.

What is important about Facebook for us?

Facebook allows people to submit content that they will share with others. For each person, a small amount of this content is publicly available, including their profile photo. Unlike a passport photo, the Facebook profile picture is not a mere means of identification. The profile photo is a core part of the way a person show's off their online identity to the world. We theorize that the Facebook profile is not simply a picture of normal, everyday life. Instead, it shows an idealized version of oneself.

Research Motivation

Early work in self-presentation has shown that people select details about themselves to show off to others in everyday life (Goffman, 1959 .pdf). Facebook is no exception. Mendelson and Papacharissi (Mendelson and Papacharissi, 2010 .pdf) suggest that Facebook photos can be considered as a 'series of performances strategically chosen by an individual', and note that 'there is an evidentiary purpose to personal photographs, providing proof of experiences and relationships for ourselves and for others'. Other work, such as Walther et al., has shown that evaluations of attractiveness on Facebook are sensitive to both a person's photo and the photos of their friends.

Unfortunately, virtually all of this work is done with college students, thus, little is known about the way in which the population in general differ from the student population in particular. We believe that in all cases, people will be selective about their photo, though in different ways depending on their age, gender and relationship status. Specifically, we explore three strategies for displaying a positive self-presentation: showing themselves socializing or 'having a good time', using a photo of (typically their) children and retouching or editing the photo.

Hypothesis 1: Individuals who show themselves socializing are more likely to be young, single. This is because both young and single people wish to portray themselves as fun and friendly to new friends.

Hypothesis 2: Individuals who show pictures of children are more likely to be older, coupled and female. These people would want to show that they are focused on their current relationships and successes in life.

Hypothesis 3: Individuals who retouch or edit their photos are more likely to be young and male. This is because these individuals must possess the appropriate skill set to edit a photo.

Hypothesis 4: Individuals who have a smiling picture are more likely to be single and young. Like our first hypothesis, we expect these people to want to look friendly to new friends.

Our research:

We believe that in all cases, people will be selective about their photo, although we believe that people will be selective in different ways depending on their demographic details. Specifically, we explore four strategies for displaying a positive self-presentation: showing themselves socializing or 'having a good time', using a photo of (typically their) children and retouching or editing the photo, and also smiling in the photo.

Method

We started by creating a fan page for the study on Facebook. This enabled interested facebook users to "like" the study and register their interest for the latter stages of the project.

Raising public awareness was our first aim, as we were aiming to collect a varied data set for analysis, so generating interest at the beginning and maintaining it throughout was key. Through appearances on Radio 4's Material World and Digital Planet on the BBC World Service we built a 'fan base' of over 3500.

At this point, we launched the next phase in our project, the questionnaire. We opted to use a questionnaire as it was a simple way of capturing the current profile pictures of respondents as well as behavioural, attitudinal and demographic data which we wanted for analysis.

We ran the survey online and collected 1714 valid responses, for response rate of 49 percent. Coding had to be done manually, deeming we had a large enough sample to make our conclusions valid.

The mean age was 38 years old. Fifty-five percent were women and 42 percent men. Three percent didn't specify their gender.

Working from the photos, we then coded each individual photo, using spreadsheet software to compile a large dataset. Looking for specific aspects of the photo, we recorded information on the method used to take/create the image, the subject of the image and the event (if any) that it portrayed. Once finished, we combined this coded data with the data collected from the survey and transferred this into the statistics programme SPSS.

Results:

We tested these results using a logistic regression. This technique predicts the odds of the independent variable influencing the dependent variable. It also shows whether the relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable is significant. These analyses were done in SPSS.

Analysis: so what do we find?

Our analysis took place in two stages. In the first stage, we simply report the percentages of people who used a particular technique by demographics. In the second stage, we put all of the demographics together in a model along with the survey question "I choose a profile picture where I look attractive". We used this variable in order to test whether this technique really did measure attractiveness.

Party photo: We find that being over 30 is negatively associated with a party picture, and wanting an attractive picture is positively associated with a party picture.

As we can see from table 1, there were differences in the use of every technique. For showing oneself at a party, 15.9 percent of people under 30 did this, whereas only 7.3 percent of people over 30 did this. For showing a child, it was much more likely that if couples would use this type of photo, with 10.6% compared with only 1.3% of single people. It was also much more likely for older people to do this, 8.2% of over 30s compared to 2.7% for the under 30 year olds. For retouching a photo, it would seem that men retouch their photos more than women- 15.3% of men to 10.1% of women. For having a photo in which the subject is smiling, it would seem gender is a significant factor, with smiling being much more common in women than men, by a margin of over 20%.

In table 2 we show the results of the logistic regressions. In the first column are the results for party. Exp(B) is a measure of how the odds change with the independent variable. We will only report findings that are significant at the p &706;0.05 level, which means they are more likely than by chance.

Child: We find that being in a couple greatly increases the odds of having a child in the profile picture and being over 30 almost doubled the odds. Being male was negatively associated with having a child in the photo. Wanting an attractive profile picture was positively associated with having a child in the photo- thus despite being a completely different sort of photo, there is still the underlying motive of wanting a photo which appeals.

Retouched photo: It seems to be those in relationships who retouch their photos more. We also find that retouching photos is not significantly associated with wanting an attractive photo, which would imply people are retouching their photos for other reasons than wanting to make themselves look better- perhaps to disguise their identity.

Smiling: Here we find, as expected, that smiling is strongly associated with wanting an attractive profile. The results also show that people in couples tend to choose photos in which they are smiling more. The results also suggest that gender and age are not very significant for this.

Discussion:

There are broad public concerns that Facebook as a culture is self-gratifying. By contrast, we found that many of the photos were focused on people other than the profile owner. Wanting an attractive photo was strongly correlated not just with smiling photos but also photos socializing with other people and photos with children. People are trying to present an idealized portrait of their life, but that does not just involve presenting the lone person themselves.

Conclusion:

Identity on Facebook is under the user's control, and the profile picture is a large part of a user's 'facebook presence'. We believe the choice of profile picture can inform indicate many things about the individual, including how they approach facebook. We have seen a general trend to wanting an attractive photo; we have seen how different choices appeal to different people and in making that decision, a user is not just showing us something about themselves, but something about their audience as well.

References

Dutton, William, Ellen J Helsper, and Monica M Gerber. 2009. The Internet in Britain: 2009 (.pdf). Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (.pdf). New York: Doubleday.

Mendelson, Andrew L, and Zizi Papcharissi. 2010. Look at us: Collective Narcissism in College Student Facebook Photo Galleries (.pdf) in The Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites. Routledge.

Walther, J B, B Van Der Heide, S Y Kim, D Westerman, and S T Tong. 2008. The Role of Friends' Appearance and Behavior on Evaluations of Individuals on Facebook: Are We Known by the Company We Keep? (.pdf) Human Communication Research 34:28-49.