A Picture is worth a Thousand Words: A Study on Millennial Women’s Curation of Self on Facebook Profile Pictures

This chapter focuses on the identity politics of social movements and uses the case study of gay and lesbian activism to examine how citizen media participation is mobilized in strategic projects of public visibility. It charts how citizens use mediated acts of self-labeling, such as changing profile pictures on social media, to announce the presence of their identities and attempt to influence perceptions of social and political reality. This model of “coming out” may have particular resonance for the LGBT community that has long sought to end its historical invisibility, yet it has also been adopted by a wide range of constituencies who seek to challenge notions of who “the people” truly are. Public visibility campaigns may also contribute to a flattening of differences as social identities become branded with a homogenized set of symbolic artifacts, suggesting the potential limits of visibility as a strategy for inducing social and political change.

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Perceiving education from Facebook profile pictures

New Media & Society ◽

10.1177/1461444819868678 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 22 (3) ◽

pp. 550-570 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Michael V. Reiss ◽

Milena Tsvetkova

Keyword(s):

Social Media ◽

Large Scale ◽

Educational Background ◽

Mixed Effects ◽

Mixed Effects Models ◽

Outdoor Activities ◽

Online Study ◽

The Social ◽

Profile Pictures ◽

Better Than

Our upbringing and education influence not only how we present and distinguish ourselves in the social world but also how we perceive others. We apply this central sociological idea to the social media context. We conduct a large-scale online study to investigate whether observers can correctly guess the education of others from their Facebook profile pictures. Using the binomial test and cross-classified mixed-effects models, we show that observers can assess the education of depicted persons better than chance, especially when they share the same educational background and have experience with the social media. We also find that posting pictures of outdoor activities is a strong signal of having higher education, while professional photographs can obscure education signals. The findings expand our knowledge of social interaction and self-expression online and offer new insights for understanding social influence on social media.

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The Faces of Success: Beauty and Ugliness Premiums in e-Commerce Platforms

Journal of Marketing ◽

10.1177/0022242920914861 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 84 (4) ◽

pp. 67-85 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Ling Peng ◽

Geng Cui ◽

Yuho Chung ◽

Wanyi Zheng

Keyword(s):

Impression Formation ◽

Source Credibility ◽

Large Data ◽

Large Data Sets ◽

Data Sets ◽

Female Consumers ◽

Online Platforms ◽

Beauty Premium ◽

Product Sales ◽

Profile Pictures

Given the positive bias toward attractive people in society, online sellers are justifiably apprehensive about perceptions of their profile pictures. Although the existing literature emphasizes the “beauty premium” and the “ugliness penalty,” the current studies of seller profile pictures on customer-to-customer e-commerce platforms find a U-shaped relationship between facial attractiveness and product sales (i.e., both beauty and ugliness premiums and, thus, a “plainness penalty”). By analyzing two large data sets, the authors find that both attractive and unattractive people sell significantly more than plain-looking people. Two online experiments reveal that attractive sellers enjoy greater source credibility due to perceived sociability and competence, whereas unattractive sellers are considered more believable on the basis of their perceived competence. While a beauty premium is apparent for appearance-relevant products, an ugliness premium is more pronounced for expertise-relevant products and for female consumers evaluating male sellers. These findings highlight the influence of facial appearance as a key vehicle for impression formation in online platforms and its complex effects in e-commerce and marketing.

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