Are You as Attractive on Social Media as You Think?

Abstract

Abstract: Oftentimes how people evaluate their own behaviors does not correspond with what others perceive, a phenomenon called actor–observer asymmetry. With an online experiment, this study examined whether people exhibit actor–observer asymmetrical perception of their social attractiveness when sharing emotions on Facebook. Actors (sharers) thought they would be perceived as more socially attractive than observers (message readers) reported. The degree of such perceptual gaps varied by the valence of shared emotion (positive vs. negative), but the communication channels (status updates vs. direct messages) through which the emotions were shared did not affect the perceptual asymmetry. Actors’ self-presentation concerns and self-esteem were associated with the degree of asymmetries. The results extend the actor–observer asymmetry research and advance the literature on the social sharing of emotion on social media.