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Popularity On Facebook Makes People Think You're Attractive
RichDiesal writes "In an upcoming issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, researchers conducted an experiment on the impact of the number of Facebook friends a person has on impression formation. When viewing modified Facebook profiles (all with the same profile picture and an experimentally controlled number of friends), people rated profiles with lots of Facebook friends as more physically attractive, more socially attractive, more approachable, and more extroverted. Since potential employers look at Facebook profiles these days, perhaps it's time to hire some Facebook friends."
I'm a hiring manager at a tech company. We generally think that looking at a candidate's FB profile is a social faux pas. LInkedIn? Sure. Facebook? That's their business. I'm not friends with my direct reports on FB, I don't expect them to friend me, and whatever they do there is their business.
Maybe it's time to find a better class of potential employers?
It's so sad and pathetic that the metric being used by people is amount of Facebook "friends".
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
If you're using public FB data to determine if a prospective employee is a good fit, you're getting what you deserve: only idiots have a publicly accessible timeline. A properly managed FB profile will only give you a picture and if you're lucky an email address, something you could have gotten by just asking for it.
On a side note, that "study" in the article hardly sounds robust.
Six months later, the researchers got in touch with their guinea pigs’ employers to ask about their job performances. Unfortunately, of the over 500 guinea pigs, just 56 of the employers responded. So the sample is small, but the researchers found a strong correlation between those employers’ reviews and the employability predictions they had made based on folks’ profile pages.
Congratulations, your ~10% response rate allows you to draw wildly speculative conclusions. The second study has similar problems, trying to insinuate a correlation between their performed IQ tests, FB profile data and eventual student transcripts. Bullshit.
... whatever
Facebook is a stressful place to be. It encourages to care about all sorts of psychopathic bullshit like this. Who has most friends, who has most action-packed photos, who makes the wittiest status updates, who collects the Likes.
Quite the opposite, some months ago people looked at me oddly when I said I have no FB account, now they just nod sagely and mutter something about "prolly better...".
FB is the new cigarettes, I'd say. It used to be cool, but now everyone who started when it was cool wishes they hadn't.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For that there's xhamster.com.
It's kinda like FB for porn lovers.
That bastion of scientific progress and beacon of enlightenment.
Trash "research" like this is one of the big reasons I had to leave academia. Shelves and shelves lined with tomes of pabulum. So much drivel, you wouldn't believe. And I'm not referring to abstruse areas of investigation, but rather all the ad-hoc, pseudoscientific articles and journals which pollute scientific libraries and are the inevitable answer to the prime commandment of academic life: "publish or perish.".
They likely wouldn't find me on Facebook.
(And if they did enjoy all the contest spam posts which are among the few things shared public.)
How long before there's a patch?
I'll ... I'll show myself out...
I want nubile girlfriends !
...but are you sexy enough to match her ?
And the AC typifies what's wrong with the world today
...researchers conducted an experiment on the impact of the number of Facebook friends a person has on impression formation...
I read and re-read that quoted sentence and still I came away a feeling of something is amiss.
1. What kind of "researchers" are they to carry out such useless research ?
2. What kind of "research subjects" they choose ? From the dumb and dumber category ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
So what? There's a lot of drek out there, fortunately it's easy to ignore what you don't care about. Like if I were to go to a bookstore, 90% of the books would hold no interest to me, and I will likely ever read .1% of the books. That doesn't mean I give up on books.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
because i started an account on facebook about 5 years ago, looked around for a few minutes and realized what crap it really is and abandoned it. have not been back on there since, i dont even remember the username and password i had
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Research on seemingly unimportant connections that have curious correlations is how breakthroughs are made. It's done to try disprove a link as often as it's done to prove it; the point is to find out for sure, one way or the other.
As for who does it, there's tons of people who want these types of research done - marketing, policing, data mining, etc. In this case, it was likely either commissioned by a company or group with vested interest in social media, or was done by a grad student for a thesis.
Since, ya' know, more users = more $$$ for them. ;-)
Yeah but neither do these books ever get mentioned on the front page of Slashdot.
I originally meant my rant to be a poke at Slashot, but instead got carried away by something else entirely (yet again). It's not that there's so much dross, it's that people sometimes thrust it in your face and present it as something of worth.
...or some sort of electronic substitute?
No sig today...
Trash "research" like this is one of the big reasons I had to leave academia...And I'm not referring to abstruse areas of investigation
And I bet they even use abstruse words like "abstruse".
I have a friend who has gone through a sort of endless circle of creating a facebook account, getting bored/fed up/anxious and deleting his account
Have you told him that Facebook doesn't really delete anything. Ever. They just hide it from public view.
Also that by creating/deleting accounts he's revealing even more about himself than just not using it. By leaving an account idle you let them know that Facebook isn't your thing (ergo, you're not the sort who responds to adverts!) By deleting/creating/deleting you let them know you're an obsessive compulsive who needs brain-meds.
No sig today...
If the only reason she's there is your money then you're doing it wrong.
Spend it on hookers until you find The One. It's far cheaper. And more fun.
Remember: Women are sneaky and knowing when she's The One is difficult (doubly so when you've got money).
No sig today...
I have a *very* rare name/surname combination, so I'm easy to find, or at least I would be if I had a Facebook account, which I don't.
So I've had two employers ask me why they can't find anything about me on Google/Facebook, one of them even asked me straight up if I had served time in prison. So I'm not surprised by the findings, at all.
"perhaps it's time to hire some Facebook friends."
I hope that companies who use Facebook profiles as part of their candidate selection process would disclose this practice to the general public. That information would have a substantial negative impact on my view of any company I would consider applying to. Any time an organization takes its eye of the ball by hiring based on Facebook crap instead of individual skill and talent, it's hard to imagine that they'll be around long or won't suffer severe layoffs from mismangement in the near term. There should be a law requiring companies to disclose that information.
Cheerleader effect. If well you don't see your friends in a photo with you, the basic principle is similar, we find attractive any mean to take part of a community.
Of known attractiveness != known to be [highly] attractive. Comprehension fail.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Why is this even a surprise? When you look at celebrities all over, I mean really look at them, you will quickly realize they aren't terribly different from all the people around you and frankly, some are exceptionally ugly. So what makes them special? Marketing.
And the fact that people fall for it so often no longer amazes me. People are mostly sheeple and will even angrily and violently defend their sheeple ways. (Observe as I get modded troll)
The psychology behind all of this is well documented. This isn't some sort of arrogant speculation on my part. Brand names and flags and sports teams and 'taking sides' of all sorts are the ways sheeple behave. Look to who is guiding the sheeple and how they benefit to see why and how the sheeple are being exploited.
In any case, I hope people increasingly wake up to their own human natures. We can't hope to overcome them unless we are aware of them. We make laws to help limit what people can do to each other where the classics (you know, don't steal, don't kill, don't assault, don't exploiter (practice usury) and all that) are timeless inventions which are literally the basis for civilization and are keenly focused on countering the worst aspects of human nature; human nature which is simultaneously kind and cruel, generous and greedy, loving and hating. We haven't actually managed to overcome human nature so much as we manage to limit it. But it all first happens with acknowledgement.
Lately, we all seem to be denying our natures and this is largely why we seem to be having much more trouble in recent years than I have noted in decades prior.
A person who is popular is perceived to be smart, successful and attractive.
It's like popularity is a "way around" the old fashioned way of being smart, successful and attractive, which actually required you to be smart, successful and attractive.
It's no surprise then that our leaders are morons, our experts are fools and our culture is hogwash. But it's popular, so we pretend not to notice the obvious.
Futurist Traditionalism
I "like" you Ronald McDonald.
Yes, there are certainly some companies who pay to find out why people flock to a specific brand.
Like a cosmic entity that increases in mass, the more it gathers, the more it attracts.
You can't like him, I Liked him first.
or
Nobody else Liked him, so I won't Like him either.
What's all this facebook stuff I keep hearing about?
I stick my face in books all the time..
I love to read..
Maybe it can be replaced with vapor(ware)
It's actually a quite decent journal. If you have concrete claims for your sarcastic remarks, please share them, but I am unaware of any evidence that the journal is not, largely, a good and honest scientific publication.
I like this research area alot...it's my research area...but something about this whole thing bothered me...
the thing that kills me though, is the number of 'friends' they assigned in the various iterations
'unpopular' people had 100 friends
now, no one has 100 friends on facebook unless they are over the age of 40 or intentionally keeps their friend list low...it guarantees an 'unattractive' rating but not in way that supports the hypothesis
the point is, the lower bound limit for 'unpopular' is much too low...in the real world the figure should be more around 200
Friend lists and 'attractiveness' are not nearly this simple & quantifiable. You can test this stuff, but it takes more than what these researcherse did. this is sort of like if the 'photos of known attractiveness' had 50% male 50% female, but the 50% female were drawn from the college sports teams & the males drawn from the Computer Science dept...it would statistically be 'even' but the data would be skewed because of the original population
Thank you Dave Raggett
yep, the 'known attractiveness' thing stuck in m craw too
I just want to add that *this is SOP in research across all disciplines*
The standards for what constitutes scientific research are just obliterated at this point...what happened to success being defined by getting good accurate data that tests the hypothesis? Is it that 'science' is a part of pop culture now? Is it the influence of pseudo-science?
There's valuable research to be done in this area. Testing the difference in perception to an online profile (and what conclusions people draw) vs an interpersonal interaction (and those conclusions)
Also, one last tidbit, from real research I found on this topic...when it comes to sex, random hook ups consistently occur mostly often between two people who share a larger social group that interacts often. The idea is that a person who has alot of friends will be more easily held accountable for any misdeeds because you **both know the same people**
So, having a social circle helps, but not at all in the ways this study tests...
Thank you Dave Raggett
My wife has thousands of friends, I only have hundreds... I guess I know who the attractive one is now.
Funny thing is, the real reason I limit my friends is because I can't keep up with Facebook as it is, and my wife spends about 4 hours a day on it. If I included just first cousins and their kids alone I'd have over 200 due to the very prolific Catholics on my dad's side (my aunt knocked out 13 and her kids are trying to catch up).
Tom thinks I'm hot.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
So, like cigarettes, people are starting to pick it up again for the image that it offers? ;)
What's the consensus of the people that don't use facebook?
You need frienditutes!
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?