CYBERPSYCHOLOGY, BEHAVIOR, AND SOCIAL NETWORKING

Volume 15, Number 7, 2012

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2011.0511

The Real You? The Role of Visual Cues and Comment

Congruence in Perceptions of Social Attractiveness
from Facebook Profiles

Seoyeon Hong, M.A., Edson Tandoc Jr., M.A., Eunjin Anna Kim, M.A.,
Bokyung Kim, M.A., and Kevin Wise, Ph.D.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of social cues in self-presentations and the congruence of
other-generated comments with the self-presentation in peoples evaluations of a profile owner. A 2 (level of
social cues: high vs. low) 2 (congruent vs. incongruent) 2 (order) 2 (multiple messages) mixed-subject ex-
periment was conducted with 104 college students. The results showed that a profile owner was perceived less
socially attractive when other-generated comments were incongruent with the profile owners self-presentation.
No matter how people package themselves with extravagant self-presentations, it cannot be very successful
without validation from others. Interestingly, an interaction effect between congruence and the level of social
cues suggested that perceived popularity was low in the incongruent condition regardless of level of social cue.
Theoretical and practical implications were also discussed.

Introduction and Pittman4 developed an initial taxonomy of IM behaviors

F acebook tells all. Friends can check on each other by
simply looking at their profiles. Social networking site
(SNS) users take advantage of this public nature of their
profiles by portraying themselves in the best possible light.
Online accounts, however, are potential platforms for ma-
nipulation. For instance, it has become difficult to detect the
truthfulness of profile pictures on social networking or online
dating sites, as technology has facilitated the manipulation of
personal information.1,2 The information available online
based on which people make judgments is mostly provided
and controlled by profile owners.
What people see on SNSs are articulated pieces of infor-
mation intended to generate certain impressions. Although
people are aware of this, because everyone is involved in
some form of impression management (IM), observers are
still interested in how others present themselves. In this
study, we explore how self-presentations in profile pictures
along with information provided by others about a user affect
perceptions.
Literature Review
Goffman3 introduced the concept of IM, explaining how
people make a good impression on others by controlling the
exchange of information. Based on Goffmans work, Jones
(i.e., self-promotion, ingratiation, exemplification, intimida-
tion, and supplication). Goffman3 explicated IM in conjunc-
tion with self-presentation in that self-presentation refers to
tactics to convey ones impression by controlling disclosure of
a persons information. Self-presentation is defined as a goal
to influence perceptions of ones image.5 These early scholars
originally explicated IM and self-presentation in face-to-face
interactions, but current studies have explained users IM and
self-presentation on SNSs.69
Self-presentation is practiced on SNSs when individuals
create their online profiles. Specifically, individuals carry out
self-presentation through their profiles by displaying net-
works and crafting profile lists. In a similar vein, Boyd and
Heer6 believed that individuals portray their identities on
their SNS profiles by explicitly espousing social information
such as relationships and testimonials.
Donath and Boyd8 argued that SNSs reflect a more reliable
self-presentation, because individuals use their real names and
show their relationships with others, thus ensuring honest
identities. Self-presentation is also achieved by controlling in-
formation about their background and interests,10 as people
intentionally control information to create a particular effect.
According to Ledbetter,11 self-presentation is critical in
Facebook since users expect beneficial relational outcomes
such as meaningful relationships or social skills. Commu-
nicators use online technological characteristics for their

Missouri School of Journalism, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, Missouri.

339
340
messages to manage impressions toward others and shape
their relationships with them.12 Sometimes, profile owners
display idealized characteristics that do not reflect their actual
personalities.13 Hancock and Dunham14 state that people
formed impressions or exaggerated personal identities of
other users to create positive images of themselves in com-
puter-mediated communication environments.
Social cues
Self-presentation involves social cues that shape impres-
sions by individuating a person.15 They reduce ambiguity
and help shape positive perceptions: The more social cues
available, the less ambiguous and the more positive impres-
sions become.15 Thus, face-to-face interactions, by providing
more social cues, are considered more effective than computer-
mediated communication.15 However, Walthers social in-
formation processing theory argued that social cues lead to
positive impression online, since people have more chances to
transmit social cues.12 Thus, SNSs provide a growing arena
for the study of social cues.1517 Carlson and colleagues16
identified the following types of cues: verbal, nonverbal (or
those that accompany the delivery of verbal or textual con-
tent), contextual, and metacues (or the interaction between
cues). These cues are also present and at work in computer-
mediated communication. For instance, Bolliger18 argued
that the use of visual cues, like emoticons, in communication
that occurs on online teaching contributed to clear expressions
of meaning and motion, thus helping improve e-learning and
training. Thus, the study of the effects of social cues in rela-
tionships and impression formation has become more salient
in the age of computer-mediated communication.15,16
The information people upload, consciously or not, in their
personal pages and those of their friends, become social cues.
Gosling, Ko, Mannarelli, and Morris19 identified two person-
ality claims expressed in SNSs: identity claims, which are the
symbolic declarations that individuals make to themselves or
others in an attempt to convey how they would like to be seen,
and behavioral residue, which refers to the inadvertent clues
left by ones behavior. People make personality judgment of
target based on elements in the place where targets have more
or less control.19 Identity claims are also regarded as the ex-
ample of utilized cues that can be easily found in materials of
Facebook profiles.20 Tanis and Postmes15 also studied the ef-
fects of profile pictures and biographical entries as social cues.
They confirmed that more social cues led to less ambiguous
and more positive impressions.15 Milyavskaya and col-
leagues21 also treated the profile picture as a social cue and
found that a person portrayed as socially connected in a profile
picture yielded a different impression than when the person
was represented alone. Thus, the concept of social cues is ex-
plicated as the additional information upon which an im-
pression can be made. Tong and colleagues22 found that
the number of Facebook friends, another social cue, had a
positive relationship with social perception, as having many
friends could be judged as an indicator of social attractiveness.
This integration of the literature leads us to the following
hypotheses:
H1: A profile picture containing more cues will lead to
greater perceived (a) social attractiveness and (b) popularity
of the profile owner than will a profile picture containing
fewer cues.
HONG ET AL.
Warranting principle
Perceptions are shaped not exclusively by what profile
users disclose about themselves. Self-presentations and the
social cues that come with them are not the only sources of
impression. For instance, a study found that a profile owners
perceived attractiveness was affected by their friends at-
tractiveness in wall posts.17 Other studies also showed that
contributed contentfor instance, what other friends say on a
profile users wallalso influence perceptions about the
profile user.23,24 Thus, it is important to study the combined
effect of self-presentation and information from other people,
especially when these are contradictory.
People judge attractiveness not only based on ones profile
photograph but also based on others comments on Face-
book.20 Information provided by others affects observed
evaluations in Facebook.24 This has been regarded in the lit-
erature as the warranting principle.20,24,25 Initially, Walther
and Parks used the concept to refer to the consistency that
observers perceive between someones online presentation
and offline self,25 but Walther and colleagues24 have also used
the same concept to argue how other-generated descriptions
are perceived as more truthful by observers than claims
generated by the profile owner. Ones own disclosures are
easier to manipulate than those volunteered by others.20
Thus, the warranting principle also emphasized that judg-
ment from other-generated information is more influential
than judgment from self-generated information.24 Having
positive statements on ones Facebook wall also generated
higher scores on perceived qualification, task attractiveness,
and social attractiveness than when participants saw negative
statements.20,24
Self-presentations are generally positive; it is unthinkable
in most instances for someone to create a negative self-
presentation. A congruent condition is when other-generated
information is also positive, consistent with the objects self-
presentation. Thus,
H2: A profile owner will be perceived as (a) more socially
attractive and (b) more popular when wall comments (other-
generated information) are congruent with the owners self-
presentation (profile picture) than when they are incongruent.
RQ: What is the relationship, if any, between social cues and
congruence (between self-generated and other-generated in-
formation)?
Method
This study used a 2 (social cue: high vs. low) 2 (congru-
ence: congruent vs. incongruent) 2 (order) 2 (messages)
mixed-design experiment. Social cue and message were ma-
nipulated within subjects, whereas congruence and order
were manipulated between subjects.
Predictor variables
Social cue. This was operationalized as the amount of
personal and social information that can be perceived from
the profile pictures. It is dichotomized into two levels: high
and low. High social cue refers to the presence of an addi-
tional identifying element (e.g., a school jersey and a violin) in
a profile picture that provides additional evidence in judging
the person shown. Low social cue refers to the absence of any
THE REAL YOU?
additional identifying element with which a person depicted
in a photo can be judged.
Congruence. This was operationalized as the relationship
of other-generated information (wall comments) to the targets
self-presentation (profile picture). A congruent relationship
is when other-generated comments are positive, which is
consistent with a positive self-presentation of the target.
Pretest
A pretest was conducted with a student sample to deter-
mine which profile pictures to use in the main test. Partici-
pants rated each of the 12 profile pictures of varying social
cue and gender by indicating their agreement with these
questions: How much does the picture say about the per-
sons social information? and How much does the picture
say about the background of the person? in a 7-point scale.
Pictures that scored low were considered having a low social
cue, whereas those that rated high were considered to have a
high social cue. Participants also rated physical attractiveness
to enable the researchers to control possible confounding
effects. The two pairs of pictures that showed no difference in
physical attractiveness were chosen for the main experiment.
Main test
A total of 104 students were recruited from a Midwestern
University. This sample size was determined from an a priori
power analysis using the following parameters: four condi-
tions, effect size (d) = 0.2, type I error = 0.05, and power = 0.80.
The experiment took place in a computer laboratory where
the participants were randomly assigned to one of four con-
ditions.
Demographic
A greater number of participants were females (66 percent,
n = 70). Participants age ranged from 19 to 30, with an aver-
age age of 21 (SD = 1.34). The majority of participants iden-
tified themselves as Caucasian/White (62.3 percent, n = 66).
Control variable
Physical attractiveness. Physical attractiveness was
measured using five items.26 We asked participants to rate if
the profile owner looked classy/not classy, beautiful/
ugly, sexy/not sexy, elegant/plain, and attractive/
unattractive. The measure was reliable (a = 0.73).
Dependent variables
Social attractiveness. Social attractiveness was mea-
sured based on the intention to have the profile owner as a
Facebook friend based on responses to two items: I would
like to add him/her as my friend in Facebook, and I will
accept his/her friend request on Facebook on a 7-point
Likert scale (a = 0.84).
Popularity. Popularity was operationalized as the per-
ceived number of friends, since Zywica and Danowski27 argued
that individuals with many Facebook friends are perceived as
more popular. The participants guessed the number of friends:
102, 302, 502, 702, or 902.24,28
341
Results
Manipulation check
Congruence was defined as the level of agreement of re-
spondents that the information from the profile picture and
the information from the comments from the wall are the
same.29 There was a significant difference between the con-
gruent condition (MCongruence = 5.29, SD = 1.37) and incongru-
ent condition (MIncongruence = 2.25, SD = 1.56), t(210) = 15.04,
p < 0.01.
Hypotheses testing
Repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) and
one-way ANOVA were conducted to test the hypotheses.
Hypotheses 1a and 2a predicted that the profile owner
would be perceived more socially attractive when there were
more social cues available (H1a) and when the wall comments
were congruent with the profile picture (H2a). The main effect
of social cues yielded an F ratio of F(1, 210) = 4.62, p < 0.05,
gp2 = 0.02. The main effect of the congruence of wall comments
with a profile picture was also significant, F(1, 420) = 29.79,
p < 0.01, gp2 = 0.06. This result shows that the profile owner was
perceived more socially attractive when the wall comments
were consistent with the profile picture (M = 4.25, SD = 2.29)
than when the comments were inconsistent (M = 3.23,
SD = 1.67). Thus, H1a and H2a were supported.
Hypotheses 1b and 2b predicted that the profile owner
would be perceived more popular when there were more so-
cial cues available (H1b) and when the wall comments were
congruent with the profile picture (H2b). There was a signifi-
cant main effect for social cues, F(1, 210) = 89.71, p < 0.01,
gp2 = 0.31. The main effect of the congruence of wall comments
with a profile picture was also significant (F(1, 420) = 9.01,
p < 0.01, gp2 = 0.02). The main effect of the congruence of
wall comments with a profile picture was also significant
(F(1, 420) = 9.01, p < 0.01, gp2 = 0.02), indicating that the profile
owner was perceived more popular when the wall comments
FIG. 1. Interaction between Social Cue and Congruency on
Perceived Popularity.
342
FIG. 2. Congruent High
Social Cue.
were consistent with the profile picture (M = 5.06, SD = 1.59)
than when the comments were inconsistent (M = 4.57,
SD = 1.86). Therefore, both H1b and H2b were supported.
A research question explored the effect of the interaction
between the level of social cue and congruence. The interac-
tion between social cue and congruence was significant for
popularity, (F(1, 210) = 5.77, p < 0.01, gp2 = 0.07). Participants
in an incongruent condition gave almost similar scores for the
popularity of the profile owner regardless of social cue
available (see Fig. 1). However, those who were in a con-
gruent condition gave very low ratings for the popularity of
the profile owner when there were few social cues available
than when there were more social cues.
Additional analysis
Although the current study conducted a pretest to rule out
the effect of physical attractiveness, we found in the main test
FIG. 3. Incongruent Low
Social Cue.
HONG ET AL.
that the perceived physical attractiveness of those in the
profiles used differed in the low social cue condition
(F(1, 210) = 92.774, p < 0.01, gp2 = 0.31). Physical attractiveness
refers to how good-looking a target person is, and is therefore a
matter of perception, and in several studies, it has been mea-
sured by asking respondents, usually students, to rate how
attractive a target person in a photograph is.24,3032 With re-
spect to this line of research, it is logical to assume that physical
attractiveness of a profile owner influences a range of social
media users perceptions. Therefore, to obtain a more precise
analysis, we additionally conducted MANCOVA with physi-
cal attractiveness as a covariate. The result revealed that the
main effect of level of social cue was significant for social media
users perception (Wilks L = 0.89, F(3, 417) = 16.88, p < 0.01,
gp2 = 0.11), and the main effect of congruency was significant
for all dependent variables (Wilks L = 0.89, F(3, 417) = 17.47,
p < 0.01, gp2 = 0.11). Hence, our findings provide meaningful
internal validity as shown by our consistent results.
THE REAL YOU?
Discussion
The current study found that having more social cues in
ones profile pictures positively influenced perceived popu-
larity and social attractiveness. This is consistent with previ-
ous findings that having more social cues, especially in ones
profile pictures, yields more positive impressions because of
the perceived reliability of the self-presentation.15,20 One
practical implication is for users seeking positive impressions
to provide social cues consistent with the desired image.
Our findings also reveal that congruence of other-generated
comments with ones self-presentation leads observers to
perceive the profile owner as more popular and socially at-
tractive than when there is incongruence. If the wall com-
ments are negative, participants evaluate profile owners as
less socially attractive and assume that the profile owners
have few Facebook friends. Consistent with the warranting
principle, our data affirm previous findings that observers
base their impressions not only on self-presentations but also
on other peoples feedback about a profile owner.22,24,25
The main contribution of this study is the interaction be-
tween congruence and the level of social cue in the perception
of popularity. It appears that the effects of congruence over-
ride the effects of social cues. When other-generated com-
ments are incongruent with the self-presentation, participants
were less likely to perceive the profile owner to be more
popular than when there is congruence regardless of the
amount of social cues present in the profile. This is consistent
with previous research showing that people rely more on
other-generated information than self-generated information
when forming impressions.24,25,30 In other words, opinions of
other people matter more than the target persons own self-
presentation. Thus, for social networking users concerned
about forming a desired impression, being aware of other-
generated information about oneself is paramount in the goal
of achieving a positive self-presentation.
Although Walther and colleagues24 found gender and race
effects in their experiment on Facebook profiles, our current
study managed to shield our findings from these possible
confounds by using photos of only Asian women selected
from the pretest (see Figs. 2 and 3).
Our study suffers from a limitation that can be addressed
in subsequent studies of this stream of research. Our oper-
ationalization of an incongruent condition was limited to
negative other-generated comments, consistent with our ar-
gument that self-presentations are usually positive. As what
Karl and colleagues33 emphasized, some young Facebook
users also strive for not-so-positive images, like being wild,
which leads them to upload problematic information.
Therefore, there will be instances when negative comments
would be consistent with a problematic self-presentation.
This particular situation would provide an interesting context
for future research.
Conclusion
This investigation not only addresses the theoretical sig-
nificance of social cues in self-presentations but also illus-
trates the important role of other-generated comments in
generating impressions. We have shown that having higher
social cues and having congruent other-generated content on
ones Facebook profile lead to more positive evaluations. The
findings apparently indicate SNS users awareness of how
343
easy it is to manipulate self-presentations online that they rely
heavily on other-generated content that are deemed more
difficult to manipulate. It is possible that observers also
consider, if not value, other-generated content as another
form of social cue that is beyond the control of the profile
owner. This is something that future studies can explore to
further illuminate the interaction between self-presentation
and other-generated content.
Author Disclosure Statement
This research was not funded by any grant or organization,
and hence no possible conflicts of interest would arise on the
part of any of the authors. An earlier version of this article was
presented as a poster at the 2011 Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication Conference in St. Louis.
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Address correspondence to:
Seoyeon Hong
Missouri School of Journalism
University of Missouri-Columbia
236 Water Williams
Columbia, MO 65201
E-mail: sh2m5@mail.missouri.edu