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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.
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.".
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.