Face off: Implications of visual cues on initiating friendship on Facebook

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Abstract

This research investigates how moderating factors and theoretically relevant contextual variables affect impression formation and the willingness to initiate virtual friendship. An experiment examined both main and interaction effects for visual cues, profile owner’s gender, and evaluator’s gender; a 2 (stimulus gender: male and female) × 3 (visual conditions: attractive, unattractive, and no-photo) × 2 (evaluator’s gender: male and female) between subjects model analysis of variance (ANOVA) was employed. A three-way interaction between gender and appearance was revealed. The results indicated that both male and female subjects were more willing to initiate friendships with opposite-sex profile owners with attractive photos. Subjects also displayed comparatively higher willingness to make friends with profile owners who did not include visual cues than with those who revealed an unattractive photo. The hyperpersonal model was supported and extended to address gender attributes.

Introduction

The Internet has become a principal venue for social interaction. There is a growing body of literature suggesting that the Internet and its communication tools facilitate the maintenance of existing relationships (Katz & Rice, 2002), formation of romantic connections (McKenna, Green, & Gleason, 2002), construction of virtual community (Rheingold, 1996), and most notably, the emergence of online friendships (Parks & Floyd, 1995). In light of the widespread use of social network sites (SNSs) in the last few years, there has been interest in the potential of the Internet to create new relationships; Facebook.com is an example of a SNS where people communicate and foster friendship with each other in cyberspace.

In August 2009, the number of American visitors to Facebook reached more than 90 million and it was ranked 5th on the Top 50 US Web Properties list (comScore, 2009). As Facebook has focused its attention on expansion and increased adoption worldwide, it is now the fourth largest site in the world; with 340 million unique global visitors as of June, 2009 (Schonfeld, 2009). Hitwise report also revealed that Facebook and other popular SNSs have overtaken adult entertainment as the most visited website category on the Internet for 18 to 24 year-olds (Tancer, 2008).

Facebook allows users to create profiles that often contain personal information including photos and video images. It is a vehicle for posting and sharing visual biographies to maintain friendships with acquaintances and for exploring relationships with formerly unknown others. Having access to personal information is a fundamental requirement when initiating friendships. Gathering such information offline typically involves only a few important cues for perceivers to form impressions of their target communication partners and physical appearance is the most accessible of these cues (Jones, 1990, Kenny, 1991). Visual cues are extremely important as they function to form initial impressions between zero-history dyads quickly and accurately (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1992) that can impact the willingness to build future relationships. While there is ample evidence supporting this proposition offline, little research has examined the role of these visual cues in interpersonal relationship formation online.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) places emphasis on reduced communication cues, synchronous or asynchronous communication (Walther, 1996), and anonymity (McKenna & Bargh, 2000). The social identification model of deindividuation effects (SIDE) (Lea and Spears, 1991, Lea and Spears, 1995) posits that the anonymity and lack of identifiability inherent in most CMC serves to accentuate the effect of the salient social identity and strengthen the dominant normative response associated with it. The SIDE model focuses on the cognitive processes by which CMC communicators use social identity variables and social category information to make inferences and over- environment should result in deindividuation which leads to increasingly stereotyped and exaggerated representations of others (Hancock & Dunham, 2001). Given the deindividuating features of CMC and exaggerated stereotypic representations in asynchronous settings, CMC can even surpass the level of affection and emotion of parallel face-to-face (FtF) interaction (Walther, 1996).

Early CMC did not support facial expression or verbal intonation as a means for establishing social presence (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976). This visual anonymity allowed CMC users to minimize undesirable physical or behavioral cues and select more favorable information to disclose; selective display of these cues enables the deliberate presentation of self in early stages of relationship development (Goffman, 1963). This is not the case today, however, as both visual and vocal cues are no longer rare in contemporary CMC settings. For example, research on gender stereotyping in a CMC environment reveals that gendered cartoon characters (visual cues) yield stronger effects on gender inferences and conformity behavior than do verbal cues (Lee, 2007). More recent research on online dating (Hancock & Toma, 2009) examined photos posted on online dating profiles and the extent to which the photo resembles its owner’s typical appearance. This study highlights the importance of online self-presentation of one’s physical attractiveness through visual elements like photographs.

On SNSs like Facebook photographs are selectively displayed to create positive self-presentations for potential relationships. The selective presentation of self and anticipated future interaction characteristic of Facebook users raises many questions. For example, how do visual cues affect relationship formation online? Are visual cues that are important in offline relationships also important in the initiation of virtual friendships? Whereas people may not substitute their traditional social networks for online relationships maintained exclusively via Facebook, this study does not examine what constitutes online friendship. Nor does it focus on the extent to which online interactions result in offline relationships. Rather, the goal of this study is to achieve a better understanding of the theoretical mechanisms at play when people make decisions about whom to become friends with via SNSs. In addition we propose to extend the hyperpersonal model by systematically analyzing how moderating factors and theoretically relevant contextual variables affect impression formation and the willingness to initiate friendship online.

Section snippets

Research on Facebook

Numerous empirical studies have been conducted to examine patterns of college students’ use of Facebook. These focused on a variety of academic interests including characteristics of profile elements (Lampe, Ellison, & Steinfield, 2007), self-presentation (Stutzman, 2006), surveillance and privacy concerns (Gross and Acquisti, 2005, Joinson, 2008, Peluchette and Karl, 2008), social capital (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007) and social grooming (Tufekci, 2008), relationship marketing

Theoretical framework

Based on the idea that communication media’s social effects differ in the degree to which they allow people to experience others as being psychologically present by providing a sense of intimacy and immediacy (Short et al., 1976), the core of early CMC research (Culnan and Markus, 1987, Daft and Lengel, 1986, Sproull and Kiesler, 1986) was founded on examining variability in the capacity of CMC to transmit social context cues. The cues-filtered-out (CFO) approach (Culnan & Markus, 1987)

Participants

A convenience sample of college students in an introductory communication course (COM101) at a public university in the eastern United States was recruited and participants were granted research credit for their voluntary participation. An announcement was made in class to approximately 475 students by one of our research team members calling for their participation. A total of 350 students completed the survey, yielding roughly a 73.7% response rate.

Participants (93%) were randomly assigned to

Results

To examine both the main and interaction effects for visual cues, profile owner gender and evaluator gender, a 2 (owner gender: male, female) × 3 (visual condition: attractive, unattractive, no-photo) × 2 (evaluator’s gender: male, female) between subjects analysis of variance (ANOVA) was employed. Willingness to initiate friendship on Facebook was the primary dependent variable. Recall that this study is designed to explore the role visual cues play in initial friending behavior on SNSs like

Discussion

The goal of this study was to explore the effect of visual cues on initiating friendships on Facebook. We posited physical attractiveness of the message sender and gender of both message sender and receiver would influence the willingness to initiate friendship with zero-history CMC partners. This investigation not only addresses the theoretical significance of the hyperpersonal framework but also illustrates gender differences in the judgment of friendship initiation during one-shot online

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