Perceiving education from Facebook profile pictures

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Bourdieu digital inequalities Facebook habitus perception photographs self-presentation social class social media

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Agüera

Arcas

Todorov

Mitchell

(2018) Do algorithms reveal sexual orientation or just expose our stereotypes? Medium, 11 January. Available at: https://medium.com/@blaisea/do-algorithms-reveal-sexual-orientation-or-just-expose-our-stereotypes-d998fafdf477 (accessed 4 July 2019).

Ambady

Rosenthal

(1992) Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences: a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin 111(2): 256–274.

Baert

(2018) Facebook profile picture appearance affects recruiters’ first hiring decisions. New Media & Society 20(3): 1220–1239.

Bates

Mächler

Bolker

et al. (2015) Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1): 1–48.

Berger

Luckmann

(1991) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin Books.

Bourdieu

(1974) The school as a conservative force: scholastic and cultural inequalities. In: Eggleston

(ed.) Contemporary Research in the Sociology of Education. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, pp. 32–46.

Bourdieu

(1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu

(1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bourdieu

(1986) The forms of capital. In: Richardson

(ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 241–258.

10.

Bourdieu

(1990) The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

11.

Bourdieu

(2000) Pascalian Meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

12.

Büchi

Just

Latzer

(2016) Modeling the second-level digital divide: a five-country study of social differences in internet use. New Media & Society 18(11): 2703–2722.

13.

Buhrmester

Talaifar

Gosling

(2018) An evaluation of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, its rapid rise, and its effective use. Perspectives on Psychological Science 13(2): 149–154.

14.

Casler

Bickel

Hackett

(2013) Separate but equal? A comparison of participants and data gathered via Amazon’s MTurk, social media, and face-to-face behavioral testing. Computers in Human Behavior 29: 2156–2160.

15.

Cialdini

(2007) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: Harper Business.

16.

Cohen

Rai

Rehkopf

et al. (2013) Educational attainment and obesity: a systematic review. Obesity Reviews 14(12): 989–1005.

17.

Correll

Ridgeway

(2003) Expectation states theory. In: Delamater

(ed.) Handbook of Social Psychology. New York: Springer, pp. 29–51.

18.

Daniels

Zurbriggen

(2016) The price of sexy: viewers’ perceptions of a sexualized versus nonsexualized Facebook profile photograph. Psychology of Popular Media Culture 5(1): 2–14.

19.

Davies

(2007) Display, identity and the everyday: self-presentation through online image sharing. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 28(4): 549–564.

20.

Difallah

Filatova

Ispeirotis

(2018) Demographics and dynamics of Mechanical Turk workers. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM international conference on web search and data mining. Available at: http://www.ipeirotis.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/wsdmf074-difallahA.pdf

21.

Dumais

(2002) Cultural capital, gender, and school success: the role of habitus. Sociology of Education 75(1): 44–68.

22.

Etcoff

Stock

Haley

et al. (2011) Cosmetics as a feature of the extended human phenotype: modulation of the perception of biologically important facial signals. PLoS ONE 6(10): e25656.

23.

Facebook (2019) Company statistics. Available at: https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/

24.

Gleibs

(2017) Are all “research fields” equal? Rethinking practice for the use of data from crowdsourcing market places. Behavior Research Methods 49: 1333–1342.

25.

Goffman

(1956) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh.

26.

Gray

Knobe

Sheskin

et al. (2011) More than a body: mind perception and the nature of objectification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101(6): 1207–1220.

27.

Hancock

Toma

(2009) Putting your best face forward: the accuracy of online dating photographs. Journal of Communication 59: 367–386.

28.

Hara

Adams

Milland

et al. (2018) A data-driven analysis of workers’ earnings on Amazon Mechanical Turk. In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, Montreal QC, Canada, 21–26 April, p. 449. New York: ACM.

29.

Hargittai

Hinnant

(2008) Digital inequality: differences in young adults’ use of the internet. Communication Research 35(5): 602–621.

30.

Haselhuhn

Wong

(2011) Bad to the bone: facial structure predicts unethical behaviour. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 279(1728): 571–576.

31.

Hetsroni

Guldin

(2017) Revealing images as Facebook profile pictures: influences of demographics and relationship status. Social Behavior and Personality 45(6): 987–998.

32.

Holt

(1998) Does cultural capital structure American consumption? Journal of Consumer Research 25(1): 1–25.

33.

Horvat

Davis

(2011) Schools as sites for transformation: exploring the contribution of habitus. Youth & Society 43(1): 142–170.

34.

Hum

Chamberlin

Hambright

et al. (2011) A picture is worth a thousand words: a content analysis of Facebook profile photographs. Computers in Human Behavior 27: 1828–1833.

35.

Hurh

Kim

(1989) The “success” image of Asian Americans: its validity, and its practical and theoretical implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 12(4): 512–538.

36.

Johnston

Baumann

(2007) Democracy versus distinction: a study of omnivorousness in gourmet food writing. American Journal of Sociology 113(1): 165–204.

37.

Junco

(2013) Inequalities in Facebook use. Computers in Human Behavior 29: 2328–2336.

38.

Kapidzic

(2013) Narcissism as a predictor of motivations behind Facebook profile picture selection. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 16(1): 14–19.

39.

Kapidzic

Herring

(2015) Race, gender, and self-presentation in teen profile photographs. New Media & Society 17(6): 958–976.

40.

Kleisner

Chvátalová

Flegr

(2014) Perceived intelligence is associated with measured intelligence in men but not women. PLoS ONE 9(3): e81237.

41.

Kress

Van Leeuwen

(2006) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Abingdon; New York: Taylor & Francis.

42.

Krippendorff

(2004) Content Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

43.

Kuipers

(2015) Beauty and distinction? The evaluation of appearance and cultural capital in five European countries. Poetics 53: 38–51.

44.

Lawson

Lenz

Baker

et al. (2010) Looking like a winner: candidate appearance and electoral success in new democracies. World Politics 62(4): 561–593.

45.

Leder

Forster

Gerger

(2011) The glasses stereotype revisited: Effects of eyeglasses on perception, recognition, and impression of faces. Swiss Journal of Psychology 70(4): 211–222.

46.

Lehmann

(2013) Habitus transformation and hidden injuries. Sociology of Education 87(1): 1–15.

47.

Lin

Adolphs

Alvarez

(2018) Inferring whether officials are corruptible from looking at their faces. Psychological Science 29: 1807–1823.

48.

Liu

(2008) Social network profiles as taste performances. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13: 252–275.

49.

Liu

Preotiuc-Pietro

Samani

et al. (2016) Analyzing personality through social media profile picture choice. In: Proceedings of the Tenth international AAAI conference on web and social media, pp. 211–220. Available at: https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM16/paper/download/13102/12741

50.

Lutz

(2016) A social milieu approach to the online participation divides in Germany. Social Media + Society 2(1): 1–14.

51.

McPherson

Smith-Lovin

Cook

(2001) Birds of a feather: homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology 27(1): 415–444.

52.

Oosterhof

Todorov

(2008) The functional basis of face evaluation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105(32): 11087–11092.

53.

Peterson

(1992) Understanding audience segmentation: from elite and mass to omnivore and univore. Poetics 25: 75–92.

54.

Pfeil

Arjan

Zaphiris

(2009) Age differences in online social networking—a study of user profiles and the social capital divide among teenagers and older users in myspace. Computers in Human Behavior 25: 643–654.

55.

Puhl

Heuer

(2009) The stigma of obesity: a review and update. Obesity 17(5): 941–964.

56.

Qiu

Yang

et al. (2015) What does your selfie say about you? Computers in Human Behavior 52: 443–449.

57.

Robinson

(2009) A taste for the necessary. Information, Communication & Society 12(4): 488–507.

58.

Rogers

(2010) Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Simon & Schuster.

59.

Rule

Ambady

(2010) Democrats and republicans can be differentiated from their faces. PLoS ONE 5(1): e8733.

60.

Segalin

Celli

Polonio

et al. (2017) What your Facebook profile picture reveals about your personality. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on multimedia conference, Mountain View, CA, 23–27 October, pp. 460–468. New York: ACM.

61.

Smith

Anderson

(2018) Social media use in 2018. Available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-2018/

62.

Strano

(2008) User descriptions and interpretations of self-presentation through Facebook profile images. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 2(2): 5.

63.

Thompson

Kiang

Witkow

(2016) “You’re Asian; you’re supposed to be smart”: adolescents’ experiences with the model minority stereotype and longitudinal links with identity. Asian American Journal of Psychology 7(2): 108–119.

64.

Todorov

Porter

(2014) Misleading first impressions: different for different facial images of the same person. Psychological Science 25(7): 1404–1417.

65.

Todorov

Mandisodza

Goren

et al. (2005) Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes. Science 308: 1623–1626.

66.

Todorov

Oliviola

Dotsch

et al. (2015) Social attributions from faces: determinants, consequences, accuracy, and functional significance. Annual Review of Psychology 66: 519–545.

67.

Turcotte

York

Irving

et al. (2015) News recommendations from social media opinion leaders: effects on media trust and information seeking. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20(5): 520–535.

68.

U.S. Census Bureau (2018) QuickFacts: United States. Available at: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045217

69.

Valla

Ceci

Williams

(2011) The accuracy of inferences about criminality based on facial appearance. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology 5(1): 66–91.

70.

Van Dijck

(2008) Digital photography: communication, identity, memory. Visual Communication 7(1): 57–76.

71.

Veblen

(2007 [1899]) The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

72.

Wang

Yang

Haigh

(2017) Let me take a selfie: exploring the psychological effects of posting and viewing selfies and groupies on social media. Telematics and Informatics 34(4): 274–283.

73.

Wang

Kosinski

(2018) Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 114(2): 246–257.

74.

Ward

(2017) What are you doing on Tinder? Impression management on a matchmaking mobile app. Information, Communication & Society 20(11): 1644–1659.

75.

West

(2010) A taste for greeting cards: distinction within a denigrated cultural form. Journal of Consumer Culture 10(3): 362–382.

76.

Wilson

Rule

(2015) Facial trustworthiness predicts extreme criminal-sentencing outcomes. Psychological Science 26(8): 1325–1331.

77.

Winston

(2013) Photography in the age of Facebook. Intersect 6: 1–11.

78.

YCJ

Chang

Yuan

(2015) Do Facebook profile pictures reflect user’s personality? Computers in Human Behavior 51: 880–889.

79.

Yates

Lockley

(2018) Social media and social class. American Behavioral Scientist 62(9): 1291–1316.

80.

Zebrowitz

Montepare

(2008) Social psychological face perception: why appearance matters. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2(3): 1497–1517.

81.

Zhao

Grasmuck

Martin

(2008) Identity construction on Facebook: digital empowerment in anchored relationships. Computers in Human Behavior 24: 1816–1836.

82.

Zillien

Hargittai

(2009) Digital distinction: status-specific types of internet usage. Social Science Quarterly 90(2): 274–291.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.72 MB

0.00 MB