We are as superficial as the internet
LOVE is definitely not blind, according to new statistics from the US-based dating site OkCupid. In fact, not much online is. Facebook-friending, Twitter-sending, even professional networking is dictated, to an alarmingly huge degree, by the attractiveness of your profile picture.
This week, Christian Rudder – OkCupid’s data guru, and the author of a forthcoming book about Big Data – published a blog post that claimed (among many other things) pictures accounted for more than 90 percent of a profile’s popularity, far more than minor details like personality or shared interests.
A graph that shows how OkCupid users rate other users’ profiles, with and without text. The text essentially makes no difference.
Meanwhile, recent research from the University of York has confirmed that people make deeply personal, snap judgements based on profile pictures. And that’s right on the heels of research out of Oregon State, which found young women who posted “sexy” images online were taken less seriously by their peers.
It adds up to a lot of pressure to find that perfect selfie. It’s also, on its face, a damning indictment of internet superficiality. But, of course, image is everything in this appalling selfie age, where phones come equipped with front-facing cameras, people are “brands”, and general rules of human civility are subsumed by the narcissism of the social web.
All these “conclusions” are convenient, because they flatter prevalent, insecurities about the internet and online dating.
They also miss a critical detail about human nature: namely, that the tendency to judge people based on appearance has nothing to do with the internet. In fact, it probably predates ye olde World Wide Web by tens of thousands of years.
Research has previously shown we make an astounding number of unconscious judgements based on appearance alone – whether a person is confident and emotionally stable, whether she’s religious, whether she’s gay or straight.
The University of York study, published this month, found that infinitesimal facial differences (like the exact size of a person’s eyes) could accurately predict how people would answer questions like, “Would this person be a good romantic partner?” (Big eyes = yes; small eyes = no.)
These impressions are formed almost instantaneously. One Harvard Medical School study pegged the time it took to accurately judge someone’s appearance at 39 milliseconds – about 180th the time it has taken you to read this sentence.
That suggests, to many researchers and neuroscientists, that we’re programmed to judge people based on their looks – in a nutshell, the ability to quickly evaluate potential enemies and potential partners was critical to early man’s personal safety/existence, and thus evolved with us today. That makes superficial judgements less an outcome of the internet age, and more a fundamental, necessary facet of human nature.
“One could argue it would defy the basic logic of evolutionary biology if people didn’t form immediate impressions of others,” wrote the University of British Columbia’s Mark Schaller, in a 2008 book on the subject.
Yes, people are constantly and unconsciously judging our appearances in a process that we can neither see nor control. But online, at least – where we pose for our own selfies, and choose which photos to post, and carefully crop and/or filter – we gain a modicum of control over that image. The social cues we give in person aren’t static and they’re subject to outside factors we can’t predict.
You cannot always look attractive and friendly in person. You can, however, optimise and idealise your image online.
Perhaps this discrepancy explains why we tend to talk about the internet in terms of “superficiality” and “shallowness” or why we’re eager to characterise online dating as a miasma of flakiness and vacuity, devoid of deeper meaning. But ultimately, it’s not the internet that’s superficial. It’s us. – The Washington Post
It would defy the the basic logic of evolutionary biology if we didn’t form immediate impressions