Do you agree with this meme?
When I saw this I thought of two recent studies that my friend Dr. Benjamin Le is publishing with his colleagues. The first study asked 200 participants, who were currently in romantic relationships, about the level of satisfaction and commitment in their relationships. Those same people gave the researchers access to their personal Facebook profiles; assistants then looked at each profile to see if the participants had a) set their relationship statuses to "in a relationship" and b) if their profile pictures were selfies or "relfies" (relationship selfies) with their romantic partners. The assistants used what they found to guess the level of satisfaction and commitment of each participant's romantic relationship.
It turned out that they were particularly likely to guess that a relationship was great when a person's status was set to "in a relationship" AND that person's profile pic was a relfie. The guesses by the assistants were also very similar to the actual self-reports from the participants themselves.
In the second study, the researchers got creative and made up fake Facebook profiles for imaginary people. Some of the profiles had the relationship status set to "in a relationship" and others didn't; some of the profiles had selfies as profile pictures while others had relfies. The researchers also varied the character of the status updates: some gave a lot of personal details about the relationship and gushed about the romantic partner; others were positive about the partner but did not give a lot of relationship details; and other statuses were not about the romantic partner at all.
One hundred new participants (who did not realize that what they were seeing was not real) got to look at these fake profiles and were asked to rate the imaginary people from these profiles on the quality of their relationship satisfaction and commitment. The participants also were asked how much they liked each of the imaginary people who owned these profiles.
Similar to what was found in the first study, the participants were most likely to think the imaginary person was in a great relationship if his or her Facebook profile included"in a relationship" AND that person's profile pic was a relfie. In addition, when status updates included personal details about the relationship and ooey-gooey gushing about the romantic partner - the relationship was especially likely to be judged as a good one.
However, those mushy status updates came at a price: the imaginary people who posted those types of statuses were the LEAST LIKED by the participants. TMI much?
So, is the meme correct? Yes and no according to these findings. If you display your romantic relationship on Facebook because you have an awesome relationship you can bet that your message will be read loud and clear by your Facebook friends: they are likely to interpret your status, relfies, and posts to mean that your relationship is solid. However, the more lovey-dovey your status updates are...your friends may start to like you a bit less.
You win some, you lose some. Happy Valentine's Day!
Further Reading:
You can read Dr. Le's description of his studies and other research related to relfies on the Science of Relationships website. This is great site run by psychologists (two of my friends!) that provides good research on relationships in a fun to read format.
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