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You are here: Home / Spring 2021 / Spring 2021: Course/Section / Spring 2021: 411-02 / PSYC 411-02_Spring21_Group2

Perceptions of Social Media Influencers Based on Race, Gender, and Interest

Nancy Martin, Hannah McCarthy, & Destiny Kay

a Research Seminar Project supervised by Dr. Mindy Erchull
(Spring 2021)

    Stahlman
    27 Apr 2021
    5:58pm

    Can you speak to the origins of the differences in which people perceive others? There’s a ton of evidence that individuals are treated differently, all else equal, on many bases (e.g., race, gender, gender conformity, sexual orientation, and so forth), but I’m not as aware of work in which the origins of such differences were explained outside of handwaving and just-so stories.

    Reply
      Nancy Martin
      1 May 2021
      8:51am

      Hello Dr. Stahlman! We used many different back literature peer-reviewed sources to help understand/learn more about how people perceive each other. The exact origin of people’s perception of others would be extremely hard to find since it traces back millions of years ago when people first started existing and interacting with each other. The closest theory I can think of about this concept is Tribalism and people sticking with their similar looking groups. We also cited many sources in our presentation that are much more recent that can help elaborate on your question.

      Reply
    Abby Horner
    28 Apr 2021
    4:58pm

    I would be curious to see what the percentages were of the respondents based on race, sexuality, and gender to see how they viewed these different people. This is a really relevant study in this day and age because influencers are all over social media, and seeing how others can perceive them based on conformity, race, and gender is very interesting.

    Reply
      Nancy Martin
      1 May 2021
      9:00am

      Hello Abby!
      Thank you for commenting!
      You’re exactly right! This is very relevant to our social media driven society today!

      The demographic questions showed these averages for our general recruitment respondents were: age= 45, gender= female, sexual orientation= straight/heterosexual, race= white, number of social media apps= 2.8, number of hours on social media= 4-6, and socioeconomic status= middle class.

      The demographic questions showed these averages for our UMW participant recruitment respondents were: age= 19, gender= close balance of male and female, sexual orientation= straight/heterosexual, race= white, number of social media apps= 5, number of hours on social media= 4-6, and socioeconomic status= middle class.

      We did get multiple responses from different races, sexual orientation, and gender respondents as well, but above are the averages.

      Reply
    Lindsay Fedder
    29 Apr 2021
    11:03am

    This study was well researched and very relevant because of the influence social media has on a lot of people. Do you think people would have had different perceptions if you had incorporated other social media platforms, such as TikTok? Considering the research on implicit racial biases that you discussed, it would also be interesting to look at the demographic information of participants (i.e., their gender identity, race, or age) to see if that played a role in their responses. I really enjoyed listening to this study! Great job!

    Reply
      Nancy Martin
      29 Apr 2021
      2:49pm

      Thank you Lindsay! We appreciate your kind comments! We tried to do something relevant and interesting that college students today and others can relate to. I personally think we would have gotten slightly different responses if we had used TikTok because TikTok is so new and has primarily college and younger users. We wanted the general public, older than college, to be able to confidently participate so Instagram was the better choice for our study. I would love to see someone do this study using TikTok and other social media apps. We wanted to look into the effects of race but we unfortunately were unable to due to a miscoding in qualtrics.

      Reply
      Hannah McCarthy
      2 May 2021
      5:50pm

      Thank you Lindsey! It’s hard to say whether people would have different perceptions of influencers based on what social media platform we used. I think if we used TikTok we would have seen their perceptions change because TikTok is full of videos and has a different demographic of influencers. Throughout the study I was thinking of how the participants’ implicit biases may have shown up in their responses. It would be interesting to see that in a future study how people identify could affect their perceptions!

      Reply
    Gina-Marie An
    29 Apr 2021
    9:49pm

    Great job making a trendy topic into a substantial research project for to learn from! There was a lot of interesting back literature such as gender non conformity and its significant relationship with aggression as well as even peer victimization and homophobia. Do you think peer victimization, homophobia, or any of the -isms are relevant in your results? With your results on non conformity and aggression, do you think the results showcased any of the -isms? As a whole, your topic of interest of gender impacting online interaction was very interesting.

    Reply
      Nancy Martin
      1 May 2021
      9:05am

      Hello Gina!
      Thank you for your nice comment!
      To answer your first question, yes, I do think that peer victimization and homophobia, responses can be seen based off of how the non-conforming and female influencers were rated on the perception adjective pairs questions. It was not as obvious as I thought it would be but there was still some underlying judgment that showed. This could be because people wanted to answer nicer than what they would typically think due to this being a University study.

      To answer your second question, yes, I think this study did show the effect of sexism, racism, and gender stereotypes and the extent of our judgements and perceptions based off of the responses to the adjective pair questions.
      Thank you!

      Reply
    Marie Bright
    29 Apr 2021
    10:30pm

    I really enjoyed your presentation. I thought it was very interesting to know that white college students perceived black women. I wonder if that has to do anything to do with culture and upbringing. I also wonder if the social media feeds that are generated by the social media platforms have an effect on how people see gender, race and interest.

    Reply
      Nancy Martin
      1 May 2021
      9:12am

      Hello Marie!
      Thank you for your nice comment!
      Yes, I do believe that this can be related to (of some degree) people’s culture and upbringing since that is what tends to shape our views the most. Another group in my research class studies “The Effect of Parental Division of Labor and Gender/Sex-Based Bullying on Women’s Gender Beliefs, Attitudes, and Behaviors” where they looked more in-depth of upbringing. Here is the link to them: https://umwpsychologyresearch.com/spring-2021/spring-2021-course-section/spring-2021-411-02/psyc-411-02_spring21_group1/

      To answer your second question, yes, I do think that social media feeds that are generated by the social media platforms also have a huge effect on how people see gender, race, and interest. This can be because of one’s culture, they tend to follow many accounts of people of their same culture. Targeted advertising can also cause an effect of societal views.

      Reply
    Dalton Charron
    30 Apr 2021
    9:10am

    Hi guys really great study its been a pleasure watching this presentation grow from the beginning of the semester. I think it is very interesting you found signficance for the main effect of gender. I how people percieve people on social media is very different for those who are female and those who are male. I think espically with women there is such a stigma around what you post, and if you dont post well enough you almost get judged for it. I think it is also interesting that there was no significance with race. There is so much issues especially present day in relation to race. I feel like your study also assessed that being carried over to social media. Do you think results would deffered if using an app like tiktok? Tiktok is the most recent and popular app, do you think people’s perceptions would have changed? And also, do you think people have different perceptions on different platforms? What one person views on Instagram may be different to what they view on tiktok or facebook.

    Reply
      Nancy Martin
      1 May 2021
      9:17am

      Hello Dalton!
      Thank you so much for your kind comment! It has been great watching your study too!
      As a female, I too feel that pressure to post something good, conforming, and “lady-like” to avoid judgement.
      We had hoped to investigate our race variable, but was unable to due to a Qualtrics question coding error. We hope someone does a future study so that we can see those results.
      We tried to make our study relevant and interesting so that college students today and others could relate to it. I personally think we would have gotten slightly different responses if we had used TikTok because TikTok is so new and has primarily college and younger users. We wanted the general public, older than college, to be able to confidently participate so Instagram was the better choice for our study. I would love to see someone do this study using TikTok and other social media apps.

      Reply
    Christina Buchanan
    30 Apr 2021
    9:10pm

    I’m actually really surprised that there wasn’t a significant difference when it comes to race or conforming vs nonconforming. I do think it’s super interesting that gender non conforming men were seen as more expressive, but it makes sense considering that most gender conforming men are stereotyped as less emotional and less expressive with their behavior and clothing. I would be really curious to see if there would racial differences if more than black and white were included. Great study guys, such a novel idea!

    Reply
      Nancy Martin
      1 May 2021
      9:21am

      Hello Christina!
      Thank you for your nice comment!

      We had hoped to investigate our race variable, but was unable to due to a Qualtrics question coding error. We hope someone does a future study so that we can see those results. We expect that race did have an effect on the perception of influencers, but were unable to confirm due to the Qualtrics mistake.

      You make a great point that it is interesting that gender non conforming men were seen as more expressive and that this could be because, as you stated, most gender conforming men are stereotyped as less emotional and less expressive with their behavior and clothing.

      Reply
    Caroline Hieber
    30 Apr 2021
    10:07pm

    Great work guys!! I really like your topic! I expect to see more research on gender and social media (like tik tok) in the future especially sense it provides safe spaces for people to explore gender identity and push social norms.

    Reply
      Nancy Martin
      1 May 2021
      9:25am

      Hello Caroline!
      Thank you for your nice comment!
      I too would expect to see more research on gender on TikTok because TikTok is so young and typically more of a safe space for people to be more open and expressive about their differences in race, gender, and sexual orientation expression. TikTok has really helped with people expressing themselves and their differences more than Instagram, but I think Instagram is still more of a expressive safe space in comparison to Facebook.

      Reply
    Eva Aloezos
    30 Apr 2021
    10:09pm

    Nancy, Hannah, and Destiny,

    Awesome study! I have no social media so all this stuff is pretty foreign to me. I am not surprised at all that gender had a significant effect on the way influencers were viewed; however, despite many comments I am seeing here, I am also not too surprised race was not found to have a significant effect. It might be that the level of popularity and influence an influencer has is overrun by any judgement in regard to their race. There must be some factor unique to social media to yield these results. This study could be very interesting if done with only non-black and non-white participants. Perhaps individuals who are black and/or white rated the influencers in a more biased way.

    Reply
      Nancy Martin
      1 May 2021
      9:33am

      Hello Eva!
      Thank you for your nice comment!
      I think it’s great that you don’t use social media and still enjoyed this study! I agree with your statements about race, and yes, I too had hoped to be able to analyze the race variable but we unfortunately were unable to due to a miscoding in the race question on Qualtrics. We hope that someone with either replicate this study or do a similar one to look into the effect of race when perceiving people on social media.

      Reply
    Em Converse
    1 May 2021
    9:28am

    Great job guys! I was surprised to see no significance, but such is life in semester-long research projects. I loved seeing that non-conforming men were seen as more expressive, because this does kind of back up toxic masculinity in a way, since it implies that gender-conforming men were perceived as being less expressive than non-conforming men. I would love to see a comparison between platforms too see whether of not the perceptions of people is different across social medias. It would be interesting to see if there is a platform that has either more or less gatekeeping, or to see if certain ratings would change based on the demographic that most often uses each specific platform.

    Reply
      Nancy Martin
      1 May 2021
      9:39am

      Hello Em!
      Thank you for your nice comment!

      I agree with your statements about semester long projects, non-conforming men, and toxic masculinity.

      I love your idea of doing a comparison study between different social media platforms! That would be great to have an age variable to look into ageism and the effect different generations has when viewing different generations expressiveness on gender and sexual orientation. I agree with you that the results of that study would help show the effects of gate-keeping and different demographics using different social media apps.

      Reply
    Dr. McBride
    2 May 2021
    6:56pm

    Thanks for sharing your presentation! Wow! A MANOVA! You know I’ll be asking a statistics question 🙂

    I’m a bit confused as to what your Dependent Variables were in the MANOVA. You used some semantic differential questions to measure how positively the influencers were viewed, but it wasn’t clear how many subscales the 61 items divided into. Based on your analysis, it appears that It seems like expressiveness was one of them. What was your other dependent variable? As for expressiveness, is it a good trait or a negative trait. It appeared that your nonconforming men were viewed as more expressive than your conforming men. Does that mean that you believe they were judged more positively?

    Also, how did you define nonconforming?

    Reply
    Corrianna Calloway
    2 May 2021
    7:04pm

    Great job on your study guys! I found it so interesting that race was not a significant predictor! We had talked quite a bit in class about how race would mitigate this relationship. Do you think there is a specific reason why race was not significant in your study? I know several of our studies struggled with sample sizing, and that being the reasoning as to why some of our analyses weren’t significant. Similar to what someone had said previously though, I did find it very interesting to see that non-conforming men were seen as more expressive. I had brought it up in class previously, but I do believe that people tend to view those people on social media that are less conforming as more favorable to look at. They may be seen as an outlet to them if they in their own lives are constantly told to conform.

    Reply
    Gabby Roughan
    3 May 2021
    10:19pm

    I think this turned out great. I think it’s interesting that gender-conforming influencers were thought to be more expressive. There must be a bias that people are being “themselves” when they conform to norms. I think people truly believe in feminine essences or something. I wonder if there would have been even less positive ratings if any of the influencers were specifically speaking out against gender norms and not just violating them. What do y’all think?

    Reply

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