{"id":1786,"date":"2014-11-23T23:55:45","date_gmt":"2014-11-24T04:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=1786"},"modified":"2017-09-06T11:50:03","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T15:50:03","slug":"facebook-profiles-where-people-look-depends-on-your-gender-and-attractiveness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2014\/11\/23\/facebook-profiles-where-people-look-depends-on-your-gender-and-attractiveness\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Profiles: Where people look depends on your gender and attractiveness"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many college students in the United States, spending ti\"\"me on Facebook is a daily routine, whether it is to chat with friends, look at interesting posts, or cyber-stalk your recent crush. Facebook and other forms of social media have\u00a0become a big parts of contemporary life whether people like it or not. And in current times when professors are Facebook friends, online dating is becoming more prevalent, and employers look up profiles to make an impression of potential employees, it is important to mind the content and know what it is that people pay attention to. The current study,\u00a0Seidman and Miller (2013), uses an eye-tracking software to find out just that.<\/p>\n

In this experiment, fifty-one participants, 33 females\u00a0and 18 males, were asked to look at four different profile pictures for sixty seconds in order to make an impression on the people in the profiles. The four profiles were of an attractive female, an attractive male, an unattractive female, and an unattractive male. The profiles included a profile picture, which was a full frontal facial image of the person smiling, an About Me<\/em> section, a Likes and Interests<\/em>\u00a0section, and advertisements. Their eye movements were tracked and the amount of time spent on each section was calculated.<\/p>\n

The results showed that participants spent more time looking at profile pictures of females more so that males. Participants also spent more time looking at the\u00a0Likes and\u00a0Interests<\/em>\u00a0section for males than for females. As for attractiveness, participants spent more time looking at advertisements when the individual was unattractive. All these results were expected by the experiments based on past experiments based on previous studies on gender and attractiveness, where attractive influences the amount of attention spent on a person, and physical attractiveness being used more often when making impressions\u00a0on women. These factors are sort of like the context that\u00a0influences where attention is spent.<\/p>\n

Currently, people are trying more and more to emphasize the importance of inner personality traits instead of external traits\u00a0such as gender and attractiveness. This study casts a shadow on this ideal because these differences in how we attend to people seem automatic. How then can you use this information to help you in real life? That too is my question. However it is important to note that though there are differences in attention, time spent on the\u00a0Likes and\u00a0Interests<\/em>\u00a0section and the\u00a0About Me<\/em>\u00a0section were greater than time spent on the profile picture and the advertisements.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Seidman, G., & Miller, O. S. (2013). Effects of Gender and Physical Attractiveness\u00a0on Visual Attention to Facebook Profiles. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking,\u00a016,<\/em> 175-183.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For many college students in the United States, spending time on Facebook is a daily routine, whether it is to chat with friends, look at interesting posts, or cyber-stalk your recent crush. Facebook and other forms of social media have\u00a0become a big parts of contemporary life whether people like it or not. And in current […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4879,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80216],"tags":[150206,360],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1786"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4879"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1786"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1798,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1786\/revisions\/1798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}