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Look at My Beautiful Friends
NS Research Proposal
2 pm, 2.28.01
Jason Foust, Kimberly Richey
Introduction:
We plan to explore the nature of beauty and its relation to perceived expectations amongst strictly platonic relationships. We believe that the more beautiful a friend is perceived to be, the higher the expectations they will encounter. We will deal with aspects of physical beauty and try to find a suitable definition that relates to most peoples perception of beauty. We believe beauty affects many aspects of friendship including: the duration of friendships, the amount of jealousy, motivation to become friends, and the amount of trust present in that relationship. We believe the ratings of a person who perceives their friend to be more beautiful will tend to be lower then other people think they are. The beauty of a friend can affect how a person rates their own beauty and their beauty compared to other friends and how confident they are with themselves.
We plan to accomplish an accurate representation of what beauty is and how it is defined. We also plan to prove that beauty directly affects the course of a friendship, whether it be directly or indirectly. We plan to accomplish proof of our hypothesis and if we are incorrect then we plan to explain why beauty does not affect expectations placed on people who are more beautiful.
Our research is something that all people can relate to, assuming you have friends. If we are going to mature as friends we must understand what expectations are present in friendships. And also what motivates these roles they play and how those are affected by beauty. If people begin to understand these roles and expectations better then more clearly defined friendships can develop. People can then learn to place expectations on other factors that are more relevant and less superficial than just physical beauty.
Relevance of your research question:
Not much research has been done in exploring beauty’s role in platonic relationships. Because of this it is hard to find past studies regarding the topics we are trying to explore. Some books we have found include: Survival of the Prettiest: the science of beauty by Nancy Etcoff. She presents “the first in-depth scientific inquiry into the nature of human beauty, posits that beauty is an essential and ineradicable part of human nature, from what makes a face beautiful to the deepest questions about the human condition.” This is a reliable source because Etcoff has a M.Ed. from Harvard, a Ph.D. in psychology from Boston University, and held a post-doctoral fellowship in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. This book will help us more narrowly define beauty and aid in our comparison to beauty and friendship. We also found Our Looks, Our Lives: Sex, Beauty, Power, and the Need to Be Seen by Nancy Friday. Friday explores how physical beauty effects how we judge ourselves and others. This book will help explain how beauty is a facet of envy and how it relates to friendships. A third source, “Look at my Ugly Face!” Myths and Musings on Beauty and Other Perilous Obsessions with Women’s Appearance by Sara Halprin. This book deals solely with female beauty but we feel that women are more often subjugated in relation to beauty than men.
We will forever have relations with people that we will not be sexually involved with. This research will always hold relevance to determining how we interact with friends of any nature from friends at the college level to business relationships to social relationships. We all have our own idea of what a friendship is and what parameters that encompasses. Every friendship is different but there are a few underlying themes that all have in common with each other. Once we begin to move past the idea of physical beauty determining or defining friendships then we can begin to understand where our motivations are actually coming from and what to do about them.
Materials and Methods:
Our experimental design will include the processing of surveys, observation of friendships in social situations, individual interviews, and analysis and culmination of past research. We will combine these different sources of information into a standard format from which we can evaluate and explore our specific topic.
We plan to use digital photographic equipment to capture images of the same person with minor alterations to determine what motivates a person’s definition of beauty. We will use two separate people of different sexes to facilitate this experiment. We will display three different images of each sex with minor but traceable differences so we can determine what the surveyors definition of beauty is related to. We will take a subject and alter hair, eye color, height, make-up, clothing and jewelry. This will also involve the uploading of images onto a computer and manipulating them and finally printing on a color printer and then copying on a color copier. With this use of color we can more accurately represent a real-life example for surveyors to choose from.
We handed out our survey to the class during our poster presentation. We plan to use the data we collected from their answers and plan to alter our survey according to their suggestions. In the future it is possible we may ask them to be our subjects for the picture experiment.
Sample Survey included at end of paper. This is the revised survey in which we have made alterations according to peer suggestions.
Our target audience is 18-25 year olds in the year 2001. We plan to distribute approximately 100 surveys to gain a general consensus of our population. We believe 100 surveys will give us an accurate representation of the average persons conceptions of physical beauty and friendship. Although we would like to get as much feedback as possible, we feel that too many surveys will mute our desire to have a detailed and intimate research project. But we do plan to expand our audience outside the Oxford area by distributing surveys online via the World Wide Web.
Our time-line will be as follows:
Week 6: Poster presentation and first surveys distributed
Week 7: Evaluation of data collected, researched topic at local libraries
Week 8: Submit project proposal for approval
Week 9: Fine-tune survey, gather subject for picture project, Online progress report due
Week 10: Evaluate data, continue to distribute surveys
Week 11: Online progress report due
Week 12: Distribute surveys, collect data
Week 13: Online progress report due
Week 14: Final survey collection and analysis
Week 15: Begin to culminate all research into organized form
Week 16: turn in project
Survey
Male________ Female________ Age:__________
Choose which image you find to be most physically attractive:
(Male Picture 1) (Male Picture 2) (Male Picture 3)
Choose which image you find to be most physically attractive:
(Female Picture 1) (Female Picture 2) (Female Picture 3)
Please answer the following questions using the closest non-romantic friendship you have.
Is this person male or female? Male______ Female_______
How long have you known this person?______________________________
How did you meet?________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Have there ever been jealous feelings on either side of the friendship? Yes No
On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best:
Identify how well you trust this person:________________
Rate the physical beauty of this person when you first met:___________
Rate the physical beauty of this person currently:______________
Rate your own level of physical beauty:___________
Describe yourself:
Hair color:_________(indicate if dyed) Eye Color:________(indicate if colored lenses)
Height:______________ Ethnicity:__________
Describe your friend:
Hair color:_________(indicate if dyed) Eye Color:________(indicate if colored lenses)
Height:______________ Ethnicity:__________
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