Facebook Friend-Request Acceptance
This article examines the influence of people’s physical attractiveness as well as their political affiliations on being accepted whenever they send friend requests on Facebook. According to the authors, individuals create relationships and stimulate their interactions, often based on their similarities. As such, the article demonstrates that similarities in communication skills, social and cognitive complexities usually increase bonding between people. The researchers believe that conducting this research is essential because it helps to understand the effects of political affiliation and physical attractiveness on creating friends on Facebook and other platforms.
Koller, Swanda, Noonan, and Miranda (2018) hypothesize that participants would be more likely to accept Facebook friend requests from physically attractive people with the same political affiliation than requests for Facebook profiles appearing to be unattractive and falling outside the respondent’s political affiliation.
For the researchers to make credible analysis and arrive at well-informed conclusions, they used an online research system to investigate 120 undergraduate students self-selected into the system. The researchers created six different Facebook profiles to investigate the likelihood of a participant to accept Facebook friend requests from profiles with different physical attractiveness and different political affiliations. Notably, the researchers divided physical attractiveness into two: unattractive and attractive. Also, political affiliations appeared in three categories, including democrat, republican, and independent. The researchers decided to use a population of 14 students (n=14) to determine the attractiveness of the photos before placing them in the Facebook profiles. Out of all the images, the researchers used three photos voted most attractive, and three photos voted unattractive as the profile pictures in the six accounts.
The statistical evaluation established that while physical attractiveness significantly increased the chances of accepting friend requests where p<.001, both similarities in political affiliations and the interaction of the two variables did not influence the likelihood of friend request acceptance. Nonetheless, exploratory investigation (p=.03) underscored that respondents with independent political orientation were could accept profiles with both unattractive and attractive patterns. On the contrary, Republican and Democrat respondents were highly likely to accept requests for people who were physically attractive than unattractive profiles and with relative degrees depending on their political orientation.
According to Koller, Swanda, Noonan, and Miranda (2018), physical attractiveness is a fundamental factor when accepting Facebook friend requests. Besides, this research suggests that physically attractive individuals are viewed to be highly competent and mentally healthy, as well as being more confident than unattractive individuals. Notably, the study had some considerable limitations. For instance, the researchers drew the respondents from undergraduate psychology students, and hence the results might be different if the respondents are drawn from diverse populations. Also, limiting data collection to online surveys may subject the data to response biases and social desirability.
From the findings of this research, it is clear that physical attractiveness is critical to the development of relationships. As such, people can use the results of this research to create a more harmonious society when they understand each other’s attractiveness than creating social distances that are unhealthy in the community. Also, organizations should be careful when choosing the kind of profile pictures they place in their social media accounts for marketing. As demonstrated by the conclusions of this research, businesses can easily create a broad Facebook network only when they put physically attractive photos.
References
Koller, E. C., Swanda, A. L., Noonan, J. N., & Sisneroz, M. T. (2018). The Effects of Physical Attractiveness and Political Affiliation on Facebook Friend Acceptance. Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research, 23(4).