Date of Award

1-1-2016

Document Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Organizational Unit

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Communication Studies

First Advisor

Mary Claire Morr Serewicz, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Erin Willer

Third Advisor

Lynn Schofield-Clark

Keywords

Attractiveness, Confidence, Good genes theory, Halo effect, Online dating, Physical attractiveness stereotype

Abstract

Do physically attractive individuals truly possess a multitude of better characteristics? The current study aimed to answer the age old question, "Do looks matter?" within the context of online dating and framed itself using cursory research performed by Brand and colleagues (2012). Good Genes Theory, Halo Effect, Physical Attractiveness Stereotype, and Social Information Procession theory were also used to explore what function appearance truly plays in online dating and how it influences a user's written text.

83 men were surveyed and asked to rate 84 women's online dating profiles (photos and texts) independently of one another to determine if those who were perceived as physically attractive also wrote more attractive texts as well. Results indicated that physical attractiveness was correlated with text attractiveness but not with text confidence. Findings also indicated the more attractive a woman's photo, the less discrepancy there was between her photo attractiveness and text attractiveness scores. Finally, photo attractiveness did not differ significantly for men's ratings of women in this study and women's ratings of men in the Brand et al. (2012) study.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Collette Celani-Morrell

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

66 p.

Discipline

Communication

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Included in

Communication Commons

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