How People Judge Your Intelligence Based On Your Profile Picture

You've been told not to judge a book by its cover, but let’s face it: online dating is one big library and you have no intention of reading most of the books. You'll barely spare a glance for the description on the dust jacket.

It doesn’t stop at online dating. You’ve judged professional contacts by their headshots on LinkedIn. You’ve judged your partner’s exes by their Instagram pics. You’ve even judged strangers who disagree with you in the comments section by their chosen profile photos.

Pictures on social networks are users’ opportunity to present themselves and to affect how others judge them, but can a picture tell you anything about who a person really is? Are our judgements accurate?

Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre explored those questions in a recent report called How Smart Does Your Profile Image Look? Intelligence Estimation from Social Network Profile Images.

The study asked 1,122 Facebook users to complete a matrices intelligence test and share their current Facebook profile picture. Strangers also rated the images for perceived intelligence. The researchers then compared perceived intelligence against measured intelligence to identify features correlated with each. Their results offer a variety of intriguing and unexpected insights into stereotyping online.

People who scored highly in both measured and perceived intelligence tended to avoid pink, purple, and red in their profile images. Their pictures were usually less diversified in color and more clear in texture, had fewer faces, and contained less skin area. “Essentially,” write the study authors, “most intelligent people in our dataset understand that a profile picture is most effective with a single person, captured in focus, and with an uncluttered background.”

The study also discovered instances in which perceptions of intelligence did not match up with perceived intelligence. In those cases, the profile images tended to contain more grey and white, and less brown and green. They also exhibited higher chromatic purity, featured people smiling and wearing glasses, and positioned faces at a proper distance from the camera. The overall effect was to make the subjects look intelligent no matter how smart they really were.

“Our results show that humans use inaccurate stereotypes to make biased judgements about the perceived intelligence of the person who uses a profile picture,” concludes the study. They “also indicate that the choices that users make of how to present themselves in their profile picture are reflective of their measured intelligence.”

In other words, it's time to delete that blurry group shot you took at Burning Man. The most effective profile photo you can post is focused, uncluttered, and only features you.