How to Evoke Empathetic Experience and Deepen Impression: The role of profile pictures in social media

Abstract Profile pictures are perceived as a form of social identity and individuals often engage in similar categorization processes. Profile pictures in social media represent virtual identities in online social networks and embody personal impression. The influence of profile picture styles on empathy plays an important role in the design and user experience of social media. However, the potential impact of profile pictures with different image styles (e.g., cartoon faces, real faces, or non-face images) on the perception of users in social media is still unclear. To investigate this impact, a controlled laboratory experiment (48 participants) and an ecological online experiment (184 participants) were conducted. Results show that participants’ empathic experience for users choosing cartoon faces or real faces as profile pictures are greater than that for users choosing non-face images. Besides, participants performed better in identity recognition for users choosing real face or non-face images than those choosing cartoon faces. Increasing empathic experience was associated with the degree to which users choosing profile pictures are categorized as ingroup members. Users of social media often make social categorizations (i.e., ingroup/outgroup categorization) based on the social identities expressed by their profile pictures. Our results also showed that increasing empathic experience was associated with the degree to which users choosing profile pictures are categorized as ingroup members.