Gender Differences in Social Networking Presence Effects on Web-Based Impression Formation

Abstract

As the Web continues to expand its role in gathering information, making decisions and social interaction, a host of issues arise around the phenomena of how people form impressions of others in this new medium. We argue that the Web fundamentally changes the way we find and use information and that those changes give rise to tangible and significant effects in impression formation. We have proposed a model of impression formation that reflects existing schools of thought but also accounts for Web impacts and in this paper, we explore the impact of social networking presence, as revealed by search engine results, on subjects’ favorability ratings of potential team partners otherwise unknown to them. Experiments revealed differences between genders in that females tend to be more favorably impressed than males by target personas that had a presence on online social networks.