Graduation 2003

Right now I’m taking Political Science 542 at night. This is Advanced Social Research Methods II. In spite of it being a statistical methods course and me having a historical aversion to math, I’m for the most part digging it. True, I have nights where I sit in class so bored and tired that it hurts, but that’s true of any night class. Sometimes I secretly scope out everyone in the class and then try to figure out who would mate with whom if we were all stranded on a desert island together, or I try to mentally build the next deck I want to build, making myself do it board by board, not adding a new piece until I can hold onto a mentally image of the whole thing with the last board I added, BUT, in this class, that sort of mental diversion is kept to a minimum and I mostly pay attention.











This brings me to a social research experiment I performed myself in the interests of averting boredom. Some time ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to a photo of his brother that he had posted on hotornot.com to be rated by other viewers. His brother got a 9.9 rating. This wasn’t much of a surprise. We already knew he is a hottie and that’s part of why he does very well in sales. This was my introduction to hot or not dot com. For those who haven’t been there, it’s a site where people post pictures of themselves and then visitors to the site can rate the picture from one to ten based strictly on the person’s physical attractiveness. The viewer sees a posted picture, chooses their rating for it, and then sees what the average rating for that photo has been so far.






Hotbed of narcissism that this site is, I was intrigued. How often do you get a chance to find out the average person’s unbiased, completely honest opinions about physical beauty? I theorized that the results would be skewed because the audience wouldn’t be a representative cross section of society and made some predictions about race, age, obesity, etc. and then spent about 20 minutes rating pictures and trying to guess what the average would be before I saw it.




Next I created several profiles and uploaded a picture of myself with varying degrees of photoshopping used to deny the viewer information. Photo number one was just my face, then my face in a graduation mortarboard hat, then enough of my body to show that I am a college graduate who graduated with some sort of honors, then the same photo with wedding band showing, then the full photo as you see it with my lovely spouse in the picture. What I found was that the picture got a higher rating with each added piece of information that it communicated to the viewer.









Hypothesis #1: People find someone who has achieved some level of education and successfully attracted a mate to be more attractive than the same person had they not done these things. Hypothesis #2: People find a photograph of another person to be more or less attractive based on the amount of detail about the person’s life that it imparts. What do you think?

posted by Scott in Washington at 8:29 AM |