DRAFT: Filtered realities: Navigating the social consequences of edited photographs

Editing photographs to increase physical attractiveness is widespread and easily implemented using free for use social media applications. It remains unknown how perceived attractiveness and social affective judgements relating to one’s social circle size, enjoyability of interactions, and friendship quality are impacted by this editing process, or by disclaimer labels stating that editing has occurred. To address this question, we digitally ‘beautified’ photographs of 60 face identities to varying degrees (0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%) using one of the popular applications, and randomly labeled half photographs as edited and half as not edited. Participants rated the perceived attractiveness of each individual and made social affective judgements about them. As degree of photograph editing increased, so did the ratings of the individual’s attractiveness and perceived social circle size, although this appeared to come at the cost of reduced perceived friendship quality and interaction enjoyability. Finally, while attractiveness ratings were not impacted by the photograph being labelled as edited or not edited, individuals in photographs labelled as edited were perceived to have reduced friendship quality and interaction enjoyability. In summary, increasing physical attractiveness via photograph editing has nuanced effects on social affective judgements, and does not always lead to favorable social affective judgements of protagonists.