Identifying stereotypes in the online perception of physical attractiveness

Abstract

Stereotypes can be viewed as oversimplified ideas about social groups. The main goal of this work is to identify stereotypes for female physical attractiveness in images available in search engines results. We also examine the influence of globalization on the formation of stereotypes in the Web. Two factors associated with the queries are analyzed: language and location. We queried Google and Bing for beautiful and ugly women and proposed a methodology to understand how race and age manifest in the observed stereotypes. Our findings demonstrate the existence of stereotypes associated with black and old women. We identified common stereotypes within results from countries with the same language, which are eliminated when queries were limited to local sites. Based on that, we show that results from search engines are biased towards the language, which leads to stereotypes that are often quite different from the majority of the female population of the country.