Friendship acceptance on Facebook: men prefer cold calls from attractive women while women favour unattractive friends

Abstract

Our study broadens an experiment conducted by Wang et al. (2010). In their study, screenshots of fictitious Facebook profiles were presented to participants of a university class who were then asked whether they would be willing to accept a friendship. In contrast to the original study, we aimed to investigate actual behaviour of social media users instead of mere intentions. Therefore, we sent out actual friendship requests from male or female profile owners who were either attractive or unattractive. The requests were sent to a sample of 800 Facebook users. We could show that about 10% of these users responded to the cold calls. In line with Wang et al. (2010), male users accepted more invitations from attractive female profile owners. However, in contrast to Wang's findings, female users accepted invitations from unattractive profile owners rather than from attractive profile owners, regardless of the profile owners' gender.