What Does Your Facebook Profile Picture Say About You? That You May Not Have Intended.

The more time people spend online the more that they - and the researchers who study them - want to know. About motivation, impulses, influences, actions.

Increasing knowledge about neuroscience and behavioral economics is being bolstered by the purely voluntary surrender of vast quantities of personal information necessary to function on the web. Especially in social media which, by definition, requires that the participant provide insights in order to establish a relationship, however tenuous and ephemeral.

Our understanding of the underpinnings and stimulae for emotion is becoming a field of great interest as, again, businesses try to discern what sorts of ploys may motivate someone to buy, sell, vote, volunteer or otherwise act in response to inducements.

Visual keys are crucial signals in any society. A recent study of the profile pictures people post on Facebook suggests, not surprisingly, that there are cultural factors at work in such selections. For instance, the researchers believe that Facebook friends from western cultures are more prone to provide close-ups, while those from eastern cultures are more comfortable with shots taken from a greater distance.

It would be a mistake to generalize from this one study and its limited sample (approximately 500 college students from the US and Taiwan). But the analysis does suggest interesting topics for further study. Business marketers and public policy makers may both learn from the choices such data present. We may one day be able to infer comfort level with degrees of transparency, openness to new people, ideas and approaches, intellectual or emotional rigidity or tolerance. The implications are vast, as is the potential for abuse. But having opened ourselves to these opportunities, we may optimize their societal benefit by demanding rigorous analysis of the information we have so readily provided. JL

Britney Fitzgerald reports in the Huffington Post:

Log in to Facebook and look at your profile picture. Is the shot a zoomed-in photo of your face, or are your surroundings the focus of the shot?

A Study from the International Journal of Psychology suggests that our Facebook pics are indicators of culture, based on the analysis of over 500 profiles belonging to users from around the world.
According to the study, the user's profile photo choice often reflects whether the user is rooted in Eastern or Western culture, regardless of current location, based on the focus of the individual versus the environment.

Yep, that's me. Apparently I fall into the Western mindset, taking pictures (quite) close to my face with very little background showing. The only exception is the photo on the left, my current profile picture, which is slightly pulled back. The photo all the way to the right is a perfect example of the big toothy grin that's apparently much more common in photos of those raised in a Western culture. The research reads, "Interestingly, with regard to smile intensity, Americans tended to show greater intensity of smiling (i.e. smile with teeth) compared to their East Asian counterparts."

This study from Chih-Mao Huang and Denise Park was conducted in two parts. First, they analyzed 200 Facebook profiles of students from the University of Illinois and the National Taiwan University. While both study groups contained American and Taiwanese students, the cultural trends from their home countries were followed despite location.

Next, Huang and Park examined over 300 profiles of students from three American universities, located in California and Texas, and three Asian universities, in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. These locations were chosen because of a high rank in Facebook user population, while also maintaining similar cultural climates, such as daily hours of sun and temperature. (It should be noted that out of Facebook's 901 million users, this sample is a miniscule slice of the Facebook world.)

"We believe these findings relate to a cultural bias to be more individualistic and independent in the U.S. and more communal and interdependent in Asia,” Dr. Park said in a press release posted by the University OF Texas at Dallas.

“These are not conscious choices,” Park wrote in an email to ABC News. "This represents the lens through which the two cultures view the world. [...] We believe these values fundamentally sculpt one’s thought and choices, including design of a Facebook portrait."

While differences between Eastern and Western culture have been previously studied, Huang and Park's research expands on the topic of individualistic and collective cultures by analyzing online habits and how these carry over from our real lives. Because the Internet is a prime form of communication, particularly to those in other countries, these findings could prove to be an important beginning in understanding international Internet tendencies.

"Although evidence on cultural variations of attentional tendency for the real world is accumulating, cultural influences on cognition and social behavior in the virtual world are still unexplored," the study reads.