Will you be my friend?: responses to friendship requests from strangers

A malicious person could access a wealth of one's personal information by being one's 'friend' on a social networking site. The goal of this research is to understand the extent to which users are vulnerable to this tactic. Our experiment examined responses of users of a social networking site to a friendship request from a total stranger. Preliminary results indicate that a small but significant percentage of individuals are open to accepting such requests. The tendency to accept was higher when the request came from an unattractive person of the opposite sex. In the case of same-gender connections, however, the likelihood of acceptance was higher for attractive requesters. Moreover, the mere presence of a profile photo, regardless of gender and attractiveness of the requester, greatly increased the likelihood of request acceptance. However, individuals with higher privacy concerns showed a greater tendency to decline the request.