A cross-cultural comparison of profile icons

Jared Braiterman, a principal at Giant Ant, recently showed me some of their work from their on-going research on youths and technology (dubbed “Mobile China China Mobile“).

Here’s an excerpt from one of their visual reports, entitled “Chinese Students Rarely Use Their Own Photos As Avatars” (download):

The research result is that, of the profile pictures analyzed, only 4 of 200 Chinese students abroad used their own picture as their icon versus 58 of 200 Americans.

Yet the sample contains some bias: the data for the Chinese users came from a BBS called 未名空间 while the American sample was UC Berkeley students’ blogs on Livejournal. Additionally, UC Berkeley students are far from homogeneous: I would say that the Chinese-Americans occupy a middle space between the two and therefore dilute the results.

Regardless, the original statistic, 4 of 200, stands. Yet, it’s the remaining 196 that is interesting. For example: why do people like to use baby pictures, and is that actually them as a baby?

Here’s a Flickr stream of more Giant Ant research artifacts, or you can read my 15-minute analysis on MySpace CN vs US profile pictures (blogged back in April).