Race and the beauty premium: Mechanical Turk workers’ evaluations of Twitter accounts

ABSTRACT

Race, gender, and physical attractiveness strongly affect perceptions of trustworthiness and subsequent face-to-face interactions. This study examines how social media users’ perceived gender, race, and physical attractiveness can impact their standing online. We test these broad hypotheses by having Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers evaluate a sample of 816 Twitter accounts. Our results show a ‘beauty premium,’ where MTurk workers say they are more likely to follow Twitter accounts with attractive profile photos, and attractive photos are positively associated with evaluations of trust. However, very attractive Black male and female Twitter accounts are associated with lower evaluations of trust compared to their White counterparts. These findings suggest that social media users’ social characteristics, perceived from their username or profile image, can replicate offline inequality online.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• twitter
• race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Anne Groggel is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology, Indiana University Bloomington.

Shirin Nilizadeh is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington.

Yong-Yeol Ahn is an Associate professor at the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University Bloomington.

Apu Kapadia is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University Bloomington.

Fabio Rojas is a Professor at the Department of Sociology, Indiana University Bloomington.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Indiana University Faculty Research Support Program.