Like many of you I'm not overly keen on how I look in photos, yet if you do any kind of social networking your profile photo is essential. I wrote earlier this month about just how important profile photos are after research was done into peoples perceptions of you from your profile photo. You can read the post later, but trust me, your photo is influential.
So some research jointly conducted by Harvard and the University of California may be of interest to you. For you see they found that people are rated as more attractive in videos than they are in photos. In other words, people find moving photos of you more attractive than static ones. They reason that this is because we have seen moving photos of people forever, so it's genetically hardwired in, whereas photos, ie static images, are a new invention.
The research team call this the frozen face effect. When we see people in real life we apparently form the impression of that face from the average of various positions and profiles of that face. Research has shown that in real life more average or normal faces are seen as attractive.
The team asked participants to rate how flattering or not people looked in either a two-second video clip or in still frames from those clips. The same faces were consistently rated as more attractive in the video clips than they were in the still frames.
To explore the reasoning behind this, the research team conducted further experiments. This time they wanted to test if the video clips were rated higher because they had more information about the person, so they let participants see as many still frames as they wanted. So they were in essence seeing exactly the same information as in the video. The results were the same. The video clips continued to score higher than the photos.
One interesting quirk of the study involved the order of the video. If the video was played in a normal fashion then the results were as expected. If the video was played out of sequence however, the still frame won the day.
Suffice to say you can't include a video as your profile photo, but this research might give you some comfort when you agonise over which photo to pick. The researchers said their findings could explain why portrait photography is so challenging. "… [The frozen face effect] may explain why photography of faces is so difficult to master and why people anecdotally believe they look worse in photographs," they said.
If you'd like to pick a better photo though, these three tips won't send you too far wrong.
- Use a natural smiling headshot
- Use an uncluttered background
- Wear suitable clothing
