Human beings create impressions almost instantly from strangers; in a similar way it happens with the world of internet and, in this specific case, of the social network Facebook. Thanks to a recent study, we now know that the more popular you are on the social network, the more attractive they see you , producing a very clear cause-effect relationship. The results will be published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication .
To reach this conclusion, researcher Scott Graham from the Division of Psychology at the University of the West of Scotland in Paisley (United Kingdom), carried out a study with 600 existing Facebook profiles from which data was randomly extracted to create new profiles , false in this case, replacing the photographs of quite attractive people with subjects of a more limited appeal and altering the number of friends they had. The 102 study participants were then asked to rate the physical and social attractiveness of the profiles generated.
The results showed that neither the gender of the participant nor the gender of the profile were affected by the outcome of the analyzes. The conclusion was that the study participants rated as more attractive , more outgoing, more accessible and more trustworthy, all those profiles that had a huge number of friends .
Despite the limitations of the experiment, the study shows quite clearly that people form a set of impressions about strangers based on relatively small signals, just as they do in real life and in the case of Facebook , quantity seems to be a priority.
