The pervasive power of the picture

In the olden days of the Internet, people commonly communicated with people who they had not seen. Now, our images typically appear over the Internet in multiple places.

One of the most nerve-wracking decisions people make when managing their online presence involves the selection of their image(s). And just like in our non-virtual lives, people make a lot of attributions about our appearance.

In a future study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, researchers at Sonoma State University tweaked the poses of undergraduates from formal to spontaneous, and used these to gauge how accurate the attributions of personality behaviors were. They found some not-so-surprising results:

In the new study, 12 observers looked at full-body photos of 123 undergraduate students who they had never met before. Six observers viewed the students in a neutral pose and six saw the same students in a spontaneous pose.

The participants rated each photo on 10 personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness (open to experience), likability, self-esteem, loneliness, religiosity and political orientation.

To figure out accuracy of the judgments, the researchers compared the results with the posers’ self-ratings and ratings from three close friends.

For the controlled poses, the observers accurately judged extraversion and self-esteem. When participants looked at the naturally expressive shots, which revealed dynamic non-verbal cues, they were nearly spot-on, getting nine out of the 10 traits correct (everything but political orientation).