Saving Face(book): effects of interactions with third parties on social attractiveness of a Facebook profile owner

The purpose of this study was to determine how a profile owner's (PO's) response to a

friend's comment on Facebook impacts social attractiveness of the PO. A 3 (response type: denial, humble, no response) x 2 (sex of the participant) between-subjects experiment was conducted using 297 participants who were recruited from a large public university and a community college in the southwest United States. It was hypothesized that being humble and accepting of implied negative behavior statements would increase the social attractiveness of the profile owner compared to denial or no response. A one- way ANCOVA with social desirability as the covariate was used to analyze the data. Results were non-significant for the main effects of response type but were significant for the main effects of the sex of the participant with male participants finding the profile owners more socially attractive than female participants. The results suggest that a PO's response to a negative Friend comment does not impact the PO's social attractiveness.