Popularity On Facebook Makes People Think You're Attractive 116
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."
Or not. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Will it get me nubile girlfriends? (Score:4, Informative)
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.