Hot on the heels of a posting titled ‘Differentiate (Your Avatar) or Die’ by Michael (aka planetc1) over at Sphinn, and following the unique experince had recently by one of the ladies here in our office, I was prompted to create an avatar experiment and then test it. Essentially, she (our female staff member) changed her StumbleUpon avatar, and upon doing so, her friend count increased very quickly with virtually no effort.
Now, I’m sure many of you have theories about this, but it certainly caused many of us at SEP to chat and theorize in the office. After much debate, we hypothesized that:
The Hypothesis:
a “Cute woman” avatar would likely result in more friends, given the same effort, than an absolutely drop dead gorgeous woman, as its more likely that the cute girl is real and wasn’t created specifically to garner friends. We also hypothsized that both women would generate more friends organically than a guy’s avatar.
So … we thought we’d design an experiment to test our hypothesis.
Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox from Movie “Two Girls and a Guy”
The Experiment:
a) Create 3 separate Stumbleupon profiles with 3 different avatars, one for each character:
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1) Drop Dead Gorgeous Female - subjective yes, but all the straight guys in the office agreed
2) Cute Female - again subjective, but all the guys in the office agreed
3) A Guy - just an average guy … but the gay guys in the office liked him
We decided to keep the text profile for each remarkably similar to reduce the probability that something other than the avatar would impact the experiment.
b) Next, we identified 200ish Stumblers in the given space. I can’t release specifics to protect the innocent :).
c) Then, we monitored and reported the number of people who became “mutual friends” of each profile.
The Results:
The Avatar (Mutual Friends)
The Guy (14)
The Cute Woman (17)
The Gorgeous Woman (18)
meaning the extremely attractive female secured 29% more friends naturally, than did the man. Not certain whether or not its statistically significant, but it is significant none-the-less.
Disclaimers:
We isolated as many variables as possible, but are not scientists … so take everything with a grain of salt.
Do not try this experiment at home! 
Conclusions:
1) Indeed, your avatar does appear to affect your organic popularity on StumbleUpon … something I think we all intuitively understood anyway. Now, I’m not advocating creating false avatars, but certainly you should always portray yourself in the best possible light.
Other Interesting Findings:
2) Females are much less likely than males to befriend someone they don’t know … even other females.
3) Between 5-10% of the StumbleUpon population will friend you if you friend them first, even with absolutely no history. These percentages will obviously increase if you communicate with them in some fashion.
All in all, and interesting and fun study.
As posted in Tips, Social Media, Opinion, Experiments.
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12 Responses to “The Avatar Experiment - Stunning vs Cute vs Guy”
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Social Media and Gender Issues | Social Desire Says:
November 27th, 2007 at 11:09 am[…] insecurities to come flooding back to me. After all, Wingnut’s post was just poking fun at an issue that is certainly not new in the virtual world. But, I think the reason it started to get to me more and more over the past 24 hours is because […]
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March 9th, 2008 at 6:02 pm[…] or avatar! Suppose you send a friend request to me on Digg and I am familiar with your name (or avatar) from some other social networking site such as, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, reddit or Sphinn, I […]
November 1st, 2007 at 5:42 am
Can we actually see the avatars?
November 1st, 2007 at 7:28 am
Nice find, I will try it for a day and see if it improves friend requests
November 1st, 2007 at 7:40 am
Jeff, Jeff, Jeff…. There you go getting me thinking again. You really have to stop that brother. Now that you have the profiles running, time for more fun no? Give them personalities. Maybe have one girl Stumble ‘naughty’ stuff, the Girl Stumbles ‘nice stuff’ and why not have a few of the boys make the fella obviously gay?
Then see whom is most popular :0) ….. if only we had the time…
Talk soon - Dave
November 1st, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Great piece of study, Jeff. I’m going to change my avatar asap
November 4th, 2007 at 1:48 am
Cute - gets your visitors
Sexy - gets you added as friend AND visitors
Godlike sexy hotty - Your site would be the biggest hit, your profile is added thousands of times and you’ll most likely make tons of cash..
November 4th, 2007 at 8:34 am
@ Wiep - can’t wait to see the ‘hot’ you Wiep!
@ Michael Woo - great point! More to study I suppose.
November 9th, 2007 at 11:29 am
Did all three of the fictitious Stumblers come from Ontario? If so I think I’ve rumbled you
February 28th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
This study is really interesting. Now I’m having a thought of changing my avatar..^^
April 14th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
that’s some illustrative point. yeah, girls would tend to add those of the same gender even if they dont know them.
April 22nd, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Interesting study, I agree with the conclusion and also Michael Woo’s comment, it’s human habits and human character as a sinner, so that the sexier the avatar the more hit he/she will get.