So You Want to Be A Scientist2010 Experiments - Nina Jones: Facebook Photo-fit

Original Idea

What makes up a typical Facebook profile picture and how do we choose to portray ourselves to the online world? Adults seem to choose pictures showing an event in their lives - their wedding, or a photo with their children - whereas teenagers seem to show themselves having a good time, often with friends at a party. Through investigation, I will test these predictions, and also look into why this occurs.

Introduction

Facebook allows people to submit content that they will share with others. For each person, a small amount of this content is publicly available, including their profile photo. Unlike a passport photo, the Facebook profile picture is not a mere means of identification. The profile photo is a core part of the way a person shows off their online identity to the world. We theorize that the Facebook profile is not simply a picture of normal, everyday life. Instead, it shows an idealized version of oneself.

We explore four strategies people use to display a positive self-presentation: showing themselves socializing or 'having a good time', using a photo of (typically their) children, retouching their image and smiling.

Method

We started by creating a fan page for the study on Facebook. This enabled interested Facebook users to "like" the study and register their interest for the latter stages of the project.

Then we launched next phase - the questionnaire. We opted to use a questionnaire as it was a simple way of capturing the current profile pictures of respondents as well as behavioural, attitudinal and demographic data which we wanted for analysis.

We ran the survey online and collected 1,714 valid responses. The mean age was 38 years old. 45% were women, 42% men and 3% didn't specify their gender.

Results

Retouching: Men are more likely to retouch their photos than women - 15.3% of men to 10.1% of women. It seems to be those in relationships who retouch their photos more. We find that retouching photos is not significantly associated with wanting an attractive photo, which would imply people are retouching their photos for other reasons than wanting to make themselves look better - perhaps to disguise their identity.

Parties: Twice as many people under 30 had a party photo as under 30. 15.9% of people under 30 did this, whereas only 7.3% of people over 30./p>

Children: We find that being in a couple greatly increases the odds of having a child in the profile picture and being over 30 almost doubled the odds. Being male was negatively associated with having a child in the photo.

Smiling: Smiling is much more common in women than men, by a margin of over 20%. The results also show that people in couples tend to choose photos in which they are smiling more.

Conclusions

There are broad public concerns that Facebook as a culture is self-gratifying. By contrast, we found that many of the photos were focused on people other than the profile owner. Wanting an attractive photo was strongly correlated not just with smiling photos, but also photos socializing with other people and photos with children. People are trying to present an idealized portrait of their life, but that does not just involve presenting the lone person themselves.

Scientific Mentor

Dr Bernie Hogan, Research FellowOxford Internet Institute, Oxford University
My research focuses on personal relationships across social media. In particular, I am exploring ways to visualize and interpret social groups that people interact with in daily life. I look at how people cope with competing social demands, and how they manage in a world of social information overload.