But to the extent these come at the cost of rational discussion, this is a cost we should be happy to pay.
What do you think the effect size is of adding pictures? My guess is that it’s pretty small.
For example, the “beauty premium” in employment compensation is usually considered to be small (<10%),[1] and I would expect that to be much larger than the effect of profile pictures on a forum, because a) how your coworkers look is much more salient than how some commenter with a tiny picture looks, and b) beauty is more plausibly correlated with productivity in certain jobs (e.g. sales) than it is with forum post quality.
This is going based off of memory from the last time I looked into this, but it seems to be confirmed by this article, which is the most recent review article a quick search could find.
What do you think the effect size is of adding pictures? My guess is that it’s pretty small.
For example, the “beauty premium” in employment compensation is usually considered to be small (<10%),[1] and I would expect that to be much larger than the effect of profile pictures on a forum, because a) how your coworkers look is much more salient than how some commenter with a tiny picture looks, and b) beauty is more plausibly correlated with productivity in certain jobs (e.g. sales) than it is with forum post quality.
This is going based off of memory from the last time I looked into this, but it seems to be confirmed by this article, which is the most recent review article a quick search could find.
I am worried academic studies might underestimate how bad looking I am.
I mean, what if I am four, five standard deviations off here?
I expect the costs to not be very high but also the benefits to also not be very high.