Why ugly people can't hide their flaws online (even if they use photos hiding their worst features)



Posting the most flattering picture possible alongside one’s profile may seem a legitimate part of the internet dating game.

But if new research is to be believed, those who try to level the playing field by using photos which disguise their worst features could be wasting their time.

According to a university study, women can still identify a physically attractive man just by reading his profile.

Picture perfect? Online dating is proving difficult for the 'less attractive' people despite being able to initially conceal their photo It found good-looking men were able to convey their confidence and attractiveness in their written self-description – and that women volunteers were able to recognise their beauty without being shown the lonely heart’s accompanying photograph.

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Next What WILL the mother-in-law from hell say? Her fiance's stepmother famously accused her of acting like a brash... Share this article Share Men whose photos were rated as attractive had written profiles that were also deemed to be attractive, despite words and images being rated by different judges, the study by Villanova University in Philadelphia, U.S., found.

HOW THE STUDY WORKED

100 men's profiles were divided into four sets of 25 with each of the 50 female rating one subset of 25 photos and a different subset of 25 profile texts.

In other words, if a woman rated a target’s photo, she was assured not to rate his text.

This procedure made it impossible for a target man’s photo to influence his text ratings, and vice versa.

For the photos, participants were asked how physically attractive they found the man (overall), and how attractive they found him for a date, a short-term sexual encounter, and long-term committed relationship.

For the profile texts, participants were asked how attractive the man seemed for the aforementioned categories.

Academics asked 50 female university students to examine profiles and pictures of 100 men aged 22-25 who had posted on a popular dating website.

The students were each given 25 of the photographs, and asked to rate how attractive they found each man if they were considering him for a date, short-term sexual encounter or long-term relationship. They were also asked to consider how confident and masculine he seemed from the picture.

They were then given the written profiles of 25 different men and again asked how attractive each seemed for a date, for sex and for a long-term committed relationship. They were also asked to rate each candidate on how kind, confident, intelligent, funny or humorous he seemed from his profile.

In a paper to be published in the Computers In Human Behavior journal, Rebecca Brand a psychologist who led the study, concluded: ‘The overall attractiveness of the photo was positively correlated with the overall attractiveness of the text. In other words, those who are physically attractive also write more appealing profiles.

‘In this sense, online dating does not seem to level the playing field for unattractive individuals.



‘Our data suggests that attractive individuals wrote texts (profiles) that conveyed confidence, and it was perhaps this confidence which primarily signalled quality to the women.’

The associate professor added that ‘such confidence may arise from attractive people’s general sense of their high mate-value’.

Although once considered by some to be the preserve of the aesthetically challenged, online dating has become a major and mainstream industry, worth an estimated £150million-a-year in Britain alone.